Imperialist America

[mr.bigglesworth]

Back in 04 Bush actually had plans to bring as many as 70,000 troops home from the military bases in Europe and East Asia. But why would he bring troops home from Pro-US countries like Japan, South Korea, and Germany? If you would like to hear an intelligent opinion on this please read what Chalmers Jonson has to say about it.

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now by Chalmers Johnson, a leading scholar of Asian and U.S.-Asian relations and a founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute. His latest book is Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic. Chalmers Johnson, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you respond to President Bush's announcement?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: In talking about our over 700 military bases abroad, the story is in the details, and Bush simply doesn't tell us the details. He omits to tell us the bases that are being opened as distinct from the ones that are being closed. For all of the endless talk by this administration about our support for democracy, he doesn't tell us that the new bases are being opened in some of the most autocratic or -- military dictatorships that exist around the world, whereas they're actually withdrawing troops from two of the genuine democracies that did not join the coalition of the consenting, so called, namely South Korea and Germany. There is a very open question of whether this will actually occur despite what he said. Secretary Rumsfeld is in great trouble with the military, and he and above all, Douglas Fife, his asistant who has been in charge of this, seem to have no real knowledge at all of inter-service rivalries and how strong they can be. The ease with which the Pentagon can subvert this action is great. On the other hand, if they really mean it, I'd have to admit we all ought to support them. Just this past weekend, we had a marine corps helicopter crash at the marine corps air station at Futenma in the middle of Okinawa, and crashed into the building of a -- on a university there. Fortunately, no one was killed because it's summer. But this has been an accident waiting to happen for years. And it did just happen, and Rumsfeld has been the first Secretary of Defense to visit Okinawa with our 38 American military bases since Cheney was Secretary of Defense back in the first Bush administration. The democrats simply never paid any attention to it at all. And we understand that Rumsfeld was actually shocked when he flew over Futenma and saw it was bigger than Central Park, and located right in the middle of one of Okinawa's largest cities and commented that, you know, no ally should treat another allied nation in this manner. It's an accident waiting to happen. To the extent they really mean it, that's fine, but most of us don't believe they really mean it. That they're moving troops out of Germany also because of the fact that our Status of Forces Agreements with these countries normally stipulate that the United States cannot be held responsible for environmental damage. Germany has recently forced a change in the Status of Forces Agreement, making us responsible for very considerable environmental pollution around our bases, and the Americans are now -- want to move to places former communist countries like Romania and Bulgaria, that are so poor they said, “Come here. You can be as dirty as you want to be.” It also is clear, the high command in Europe has said, “Like hell are we going to move to a backwater like Constanta, Romania. We're staying in Stuttgart, right next door to the Armed Forces Ski Center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps.” And none of them seem to realize -- I mean, after all, none of them have ever served in the armed forces -- how many buildings 70,000 troops in Germany occupy, and how poor a country like Romania or Bulgaria, how poor the infrastructure actually is. So, we will see. At the same time, they don't say anything about 14 permanent bases being built in Iraq. Four are already built: Tallil Air Base, Baghdad, the one in the north near Mosul and the one over on the border with Syria. They don't say anything about the bases in Jabuti, in the Saharan Desert, in Mali and places like that in our attempt to get some kind of a military base to control the oil in the Gulf of Guinea and numerous other things like this that simply are not mentioned. What I fear is this doesn't really come so much either from the Secretary of Defense or even from Bush as it does from Karl Rove. It's the attempt once again to manipulate the gullible by suggesting that we are all of a sudden turning responsible and careful and concerned about the welfare of families, of people serving in the armed forces or of people forced to live cheek by jowl with military bases around the world. For instance, it's simply nonsense. If you join the Marine Corps today and happen to have a family, I guarantee you, they give you information on how to apply for food stamps as you join simply because you can’t possibly live on what they're paid. One of the things that does worry me is in the case of Japan it's as if these characters are treating Japan as if it were the 51st state, and they can just do anything they want. They don't seem to understand the politics of the fact that though the Japanese government likes the security treaty with the United States, they know full well that if the troops of the Third Marine Division that are currently in Okinawa were located anywhere near a major mainland city like, say, Yokohama, they would have been thrown out 30 years ago. The Japanese public simply would not tolerate it. Therefore, they're quarantined down in a Japanese equivalent of Puerto Rico, namely the poorest prefecture in the country, which has distinct cultural differences from Japan, namely Okinawa. Now they are talking about moving some of these marines to new bases in the northern territory or Queensland of Australia -- and Prime Minister Howard may not last more than another couple of months, so that may not happen. They're talking about putting them on the sides of Mt. Fuji at the firing range there. They're proposing a joint military command between Ft. Lewis, Washington, and Japan that will be located at Camp Zama, near Yokohama. These people, they don't read Japanese obviously. They don't know what's going on. The Japanese press, every locality that's being designated as soon to receive a few marines is protesting like crazy, “Like hell you'll put them here.” So that, as I say, this is -- it is being treated with too much credulity, notably by The New York Times, which lately seems incapable of critical judgment. We have to see how this comes out. They talk about how it has been planned and discussed by Bush for years. That's simply nonsense. There's one other element in it, I think, that ought to be recognized. One of the things that’s coming up next year in 2005 is an absolute firestorm in Congress over base closings domestically, which is already required by law. The two mother hens of the Defense Facility Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee are Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Dianne Feinstein of California. They fight to keep military bases open in their states because a lot of people are employed by the military-industrial complex and by the armed services. It's part of American militarism. One of the things that Hutchison and Feinstein have done is in the last appropriation, they established a commission opposed by the White House to close foreign military bases and keep them open in America. It always seemed like -- that Bush and the Pentagon could get around this, if they wanted to, but it may be that they're beginning to prepare the ground for a big base closings fight next year by easing off the serious opposition that would come from the states with the largest number of bases, namely Texas and California, and then ganging up on the less politically potent ones elsewhere. That's just speculation, but it's certainly something that is well known in the -- when the issue of military bases comes up.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, how do you respond to General Wesley Clark saying that this redeployment will compromise the war on terror?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, I don't see that it has anything to do with the war on terror. That is to say the war on terror -- we have applied wrongly an overly military approach to it from the beginning. There is no question that the situation is worse today than it was on 9/11. That is, between 1993 and 2001, including 9/11, al Qaeda managed to carry out five major bombings internationally. In the three years since 9/11, down to and including the attacks in Riyadh, the suicide bombings in Istanbul, the bombings of the commuter railroads in Madrid, they have carried out well over 20 that -- Rumsfeld asked last October, you know, we need a measure of how we're doing in the war on terrorism. Well, baby, we have got a measure. We're losing it. We're losing it rather badly, and it's because of an excessively military approach to these problems without any real understanding of the needs to alter our foreign policy in order to do the only known way to deal with terrorism. To try and separate the activists who are incorrigible from their passive supporters. The only way so that you can get information from their passive supporters on who the activists are and arrest them in courts of law. The only way to separate the activists from their passive supporters is to recognize the legitimacy of the grievances of their passive supporters, grievances that are easily illustrated in the Middle East by the fact that we have American troops in Iraq, that we are the world's sole supporters of the Sharon government in Israel, and its extremely militaristic policies toward the essentially defenseless Palestinians. The result is that the entire Islamic world are now passive supporters of al Qaeda. I've spent a fair amount of time traveling in Indonesia. It's the world's largest Islamic country. And I guarantee you until very recently, Islam was carried very lightly in Indonesia. More or less the way an Italian man carries his Catholicism. Four or five years ago, 80% of the population were pro-American. It was one of the easiest places on earth to visit. Now 80% of the public distrusts the United States and is sympathetic to al Qaeda. T-shirts with pictures of Osama bin Laden are common on any kid in Jakarta today. Only George Bush could have brought about such a disastrous outcome.

http://www.democracynow.org/article..../08/17/1354236

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalmers_Johnson

If you would really like a true and unbiased look at how America has been pushing toward becoming an Imperialist power and Militarist power (since you can't have one without the other) then please check out The Sorrows of Empire Militarism, secrecy, and the end of the republic.

[KeyholeSurgery]

Mr Johnson, using Sherdog for advertising isn't right.

[AZ BJJ]

Yikes, where to begin with this stuff. Bush's attempt to reduce overseas deployments was circumvented by 9/11. That changed his thinking, as he himself admitted on several occassions. With regards to this transcript of Chalmers Johnson, I find it rather scatter-brained and erroneous.

There is certainly an intelligent debate to be had regarding the existence of excess military bases overseas and the consequences thereof, but the transcript above wouldn't be a part of it.

[carp3d33z]

removing troops from those countries had a lot more to do with the cold war being over than anything else.

i dont think ive ever seen such a thick, massive block of text.

[mr.bigglesworth]

Originally Posted by AZ BJJ

Yikes, where to begin with this stuff. Bush's attempt to reduce overseas deployments was circumvented by 9/11. That changed his thinking, as he himself admitted on several occassions. With regards to this transcript of Chalmers Johnson, I find it rather scatter-brained and erroneous.

There is certainly an intelligent debate to be had regarding the existence of excess military bases overseas and the consequences thereof, but the transcript above wouldn't be a part of it.

You don't think it was to sway the patriotic American's vote at all?Edit- after all Bush did say "You know i don't think its our business to go into countries and say this is how its gonna be." Well look where we are now. How about the permanent bases being built in Iraq? Other parts in the ME? You don't for one minute think America has been becoming Imperialist one bit?

Im interested in knowing what you think is going on.

[Te(V)plar]

Originally Posted by mr.bigglesworth

You don't think it was to sway the patriotic American's vote at all?Edit- after all Bush did say "You know i don't think its our business to go into countries and say this is how its gonna be." Well look where we are now. How about the permanent bases being built in Iraq? Other parts in the ME? You don't for one minute think America has been becoming Imperialist one bit?

Im interested in knowing what you think is going on.

ermm, the US (and all other nations) build bases in militaristically relevant areas. During the Cold War the US put bases in Europe because Europe WANTED us there. The entire NATO strategy involved European nations holding out long enough against a Soviet invasion so that the American warmachine could reach the front and buttress them. The reason these bases were getting packed up is that it's expensive and there's very little need for them. However, the Euros need to realize that without the US looming over them, they need to start creating a large effective army of their own. Small contingents of shock troops aren't going to cut the mustard in the long haul. While I doubt such a thing would ever come into full fruition, an EU army could be a force to be reckoned with.

[mr.bigglesworth]

Originally Posted by Te(V)plar

ermm, the US (and all other nations) build bases in militaristically relevant areas. During the Cold War the US put bases in Europe because Europe WANTED us there. The entire NATO strategy involved European nations holding out long enough against a Soviet invasion so that the American warmachine could reach the front and buttress them. The reason these bases were getting packed up is that it's expensive and there's very little need for them. However, the Euros need to realize that without the US looming over them, they need to start creating a large effective army of their own. Small contingents of shock troops aren't going to cut the mustard in the long haul. While I doubt such a thing would ever come into full fruition, an EU army could be a force to be reckoned with.

I agree and I believe these Euro countries need to step up themselves.

Can you explain why it is that whenever there is a problem the US has with another country they try to resolve it by going to war or intimidation through their military? Is that not militaristic? And can you give me some evidence of America resolving conflicts by peaceful means?

[Zankou]

Constantly. The United States incessantly resolves its conflicts without military force. For example, its recent trade conflicts with Europe, Canada, Mexico, etc. Or its bitching about human rights in nations that it has not the slightest indication of attacking ... like China, Russia, etc.

People are not very interested in such "soft" conflicts, however, so they get comparatively little press. People are only interested in violent military conflicts.

At some level all U.S. conflicts take into account the ultimate possibility of military conflict, as do all political conflicts. But nobody thought the recent US/Canada trade war (for example) was going to get resolved by military action, and to describe such conflicts as "military" is really stretching hard.

you guys are STILL thinking too much in the short term (last few terms) and small scope (the bases themselves) rather than long term (decades and generations) and big picture (the world map)

referring to cold war is a good start tho.

connect the dots of the militaries and see what picture you get?

the big dipper... sorry, just kidding.. =\

[mr.bigglesworth]

Originally Posted by sugarboyae

you guys are STILL thinking too much in the short term (last few terms) and small scope (the bases themselves) rather than long term (decades and generations) and big picture (the world map)

referring to cold war is a good start tho.

connect the dots of the militaries and see what picture you get?

the big dipper... sorry, just kidding.. =\

America began back in 1898 with the spanish-american war, then when woodrow wilson came in he really got it kick started.