Sorrows of Empire By Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson is the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute in California and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. This essay is an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Repbublic (New York: Metropolitan Books; and London: Verso).
. . . Implementation of the National Security Strategy will be considerably more problematic than its promulgation and contains numerous unintended consequences. By mid-2003, the United States armed forces were already seriously overstretched, and the U.S. government was going deeply into debt to finance its war machine. The American budget dedicated to international affairs allocates 93% to the military and only 7% to the State Department, and does not have much flexibility left for further military adventures.3 The Pentagon has deployed a quarter of a million troops against Iraq, several thousand soldiers are engaged in daily skirmishes in Afghanistan, countless Navy and Air Force crews are manning strategic weapons in the waters off North Korea, a few thousand Marines have been dispatched to the southern Philippines to fight a century-old Islamic separatist movement, several hundred "advisers" are participating in the early stages of a Vietnam-like insurgency in Colombia and elsewhere in the Andean nations, and the U.S. currently maintains a military presence in 140 of the 189 member countries of the United Nations, including significant deployments in twenty-five. The U.S. has military treaties or binding security arrangements with at least thirty-six countries.4 . . .
NOTES . . .
3. Tom Barry, "The U.S. Power Complex: What's New?" Foreign Policy in Focus, Special Report, November 2002, n. 11. 4. Madhavee Inamdar, "Global Vigilance in a Global Village: U.S. Expands Its Military Bases," The Progressive Response, vol. 6, no. 41 (December 31, 2002). . . .
(Chalmers Johnson, "Sorrows of Empire," _Foreign Policy In Focus_, Silver City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, November 2003, <http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/sorrows2003.html>) ***** -- Yoshie
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