An unsettling look at the American empire

NEMESIS: THE LAST DAYS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC By Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 354 pages, $26

In Blowback, the first book of what developed into an "inadvertent" trilogy now concluded with Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson argued that what Americans don't know can definitely hurt them. "Blowback," is the CIA term for "retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has carried out abroad that it kept secret from the American public (even though such acts are seldom secret among the people on the receiving end)." A year and a half after the book was published the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 occurred, which Mr. Johnson considers "the clearest examples of blowback in modern international relations."

Mr. Johnson writes again of things that can hurt us even if we don't know about them--or perhaps prefer not to think about them. Quite simply, he maintains that while still home to a democratic system that is the envy of many, the United States conducts itself as an empire around the globe. And this makes a lot of people unhappy, even if Americans may remain largely oblivious to it.

In these hyperbole-ridden times, Mr. Johnson's principal challenge is convincing readers that all this is not metaphor, that U.S. government actions really are those of a nation seeing itself as having the right to use any means necessary to keep the world running the way it deems appropriate, much as the earlier Roman and British empires did. So how would we recognize their modern equivalent? For openers, Mr. Johnson suggests, the contemporary empire might station half a million of its troops in over 130 foreign countries, as the United States does. Americans grew accustomed to the idea of a global army during the Cold War when we were told we had to be prepared to do to the Soviet Union before it did to us. The "Evil Empire" went away; ours kept going, sometimes filling the void by embracing Soviet-successor dictatorships as partners in the "war on terror," other times, Mr. Johnson writes, using "front organizations to bring to power pro-U.S. governments in ... former Soviet states."

A modern empire might also kidnap political enemies and deliver them up to be tortured, not at home in full view but in allied countries like the erstwhile Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. Mr. Johnson reports that the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, "disclosed that the Uzbek government's specialty for prisoners kidnapped by the CIA was boiling them alive. The ambassador's deputy, sent to talk to the CIA's Tashkent station chief about this, was told, 'The CIA doesn't see this as a problem.'" Or the empire's secret police might do the job themselves, but, again, in foreign countries. The author writes, "Human Rights Watch has identified at least 24 secret detention and interrogation centers worldwide operated by the CIA."

A 21st-century empire might have a secret military budget for operations that the folks back home have no need to know about, like "the Defense Department's black budget, secret from all citizens and virtually all members of Congress ... estimated at the end of 2005 at $28 billion per year." And the head of state of the modern empire might have an armed force responsible only to him, as the Roman emperors had the Praetorian Guard. Mr. Johnson considers "the president's untrammeled control of the CIA ... probably the single most extraordinary power the imperial presidency possesses."

The empire would likely require its soldiers to answer to its own laws rather than those of the lesser powers where they might be stationed, as per the Status of Forces Agreements "intended above all to put any U.S. forces stationed in the host country as far beyond its domestic laws as possible." There are 93 such agreements known, but "some SOFAs are so embarrassing to the host nation, particularly in the Islamic world, that they are kept secret." Mr. Johnson dedicates an entire chapter to Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan that is host to 37 American military bases, where in 2004 a local editorial proclaimed, "The Marines believe that they are above the law and can do anything with impunity."

Within the sheltered empire, even top operators might remain oblivious to its reality and live instead in its myth. Mr. Johnson himself wonders "why former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and others believed American invading forces would be welcomed as liberators" in Iraq when the U.N. coordinator for the country had five years earlier denounced the U.S.-led sanctions, widely considered responsible for the death of 350,000 children, as "a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq," and even "genocide." But Johnson might as well ask of what account is a U.N. opinion in Washington? (Of course, Wolfowitz's subsequent tenure at the World Bank does also suggest that he may just be stupider than the average sub-cabinet member.)