MEDIA MATTERS TRANSCRIPT - 3/14/2010 - 1PM - WILL AM580 - URBANA, IL
[ROBERT MCCHESNEY]: Alright, welcome back. This is Bob McChesney. This is Media Matters. It’s March 14, 2010, here on WILL AM580, based in beautiful Urbana, Illinois. Today we have as our guest, someone we are honored to have return to us, he’s been a guest several times in the past, usually when he’s had a new book out. And he has another new book coming out this summer, and we’ll be sure to have him back on the air when the book’s actually been released, so that we can talk about it in detail. Our guest, of course, is professor Chalmers Johnson, formerly of the University of California, San Diego, a political scientist and author of the Blowback trilogy, and the forthcoming book “Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last, Best Hope,” which will be out mid-summer with Metropolitan Books. Professor Johnson, thank you very much for joining us.
[CHALMERS JOHNSON]: Thank you indeed, it’s a pleasure to talk with you.
[RM]: Well, you know, I wish I could say there’s a long list of scholars writing the same area as you are.
[CJ]: I do, too.
[RM]: I know you do. Because I do find it very interesting in its own right that the field discussing the American overseas establishment empire is largely untouched, at least in popular writing amongst professors and scholars, and certainly untouched among politicians, with just a few exceptions.
[CJ]: The Americans appear to be in deep denial that the world is changing in quite decisive ways. We are no longer number one, whatever that might mean. Nor are we able to dictate to the rest of the world as we have in the past, on what we’re trying to do. The world doesn’t particularly believe in us anymore. We certainly see this in Asia, where one of the truly amazing things is to see both China and Japan, India maybe in a slightly different way, emerging as genuinely independent nations, no longer dependent upon precedence from the West.
[RM]: Professor Johnson, one thing just to touch on that. I think that in most American political discourse, from both political parties, and I think in sort of a conventional wisdom among anyone in the news media, is that the United States, is of course a force for good in the world, and the purest country in the world that’s most concerned with human rights and democracy, and that no other country equals us. Some get close to us, most agree with us, and approve us are of course close to us, but, and we are the best. And I think the general sense is that governments around the world are judged as good governments to the extent that they agree with that understanding of the United States. And, I’d like you to comment on that. Also, what is in the real world of the people of the world, the governments of the world, what is the view of the United States around the world that’s not accurate?
[CJ]: Well, it’s a point of view that’s very common in America, but it simply doesn’t hold up that we’re running out of money. We’re broke. We, a country that’s as deeply into a recession as we are, deeply indebted as we are, spending somewhere around, once you add it all up in various ways, and this has been done by a lot of different people, so it’s not just me, you’re getting defense budget or national security budget of around $1 trillion a year, in a country that can’t afford it. All of this is farcical. The American empire is over. It’s known to be over. The Chinese certainly have known for some time now. The Japanese are working hard to figure out a new world for themselves, and they no longer define their goals or the possibilities for their country in the future in terms of American ideas. That this is… the American dream, if you will, is a bit passé. And the rest of the world knows it, beginning to know it, taking them some time to absorb it, but they’re really beginning to know it. And above all, they know that the American Pentagon, the world of the American defense system, are fantastic expenditures on weapons that don’t work. This is proving to be farcical.
[RM]: Chalmers Johnson, in Blowback, in your trilogy, and now the forthcoming book “Dismantling the Empire,” a key part of the argument is these enormous web of U.S. military bases around the world, which to this day I think very little Americans, unless they’re actually in the military, involved directly in this, have any idea that this is going on around the world and how this compares to what other nations are doing. Could you just, for the sake of listeners who are unfamiliar with this, give an overview if you would please of just what the extent of U.S. Military bases is around the world.
[CJ]: Well, there are many different definitions, but taking the simplest, that is the pentagon’s actual base status report, which is an inventory of our military bases, literally that around the world, airports or anything else, but military bases with troops on them, then we have well over 700 around the world. And no other nation has ever had that many, or needs that many, that most of these have built through a process of accretion over time, as are from our various wars, from the cold war, from our pretense of being the new Rome and dominating the world, they’re fantastically expensive. I guarantee you that. They create huge antagonisms in the countries in which they’re located. It’s a huge majority of the nations in the United Nations know the United States primarily through the presence of American soldiers in their countries. We don’t know foreigners because of their soldiers in our country, we know them through various other things, above all, their products we like so much. But it’s a military mindset that still dominates our country. Dominates our thinking, our belief that if for any reason, we should ever not be militarily overwhelming in the face of the rest of the world, that we are already in decline. Not to realize it in fact that we are already deeply in decline. That is really what’s new, that these problems have been building for a very long time. They’ve now come home to roost. And there’s no way to avoid them, that’s what I mean in my new book, which is a collection of essays I’ve written over the past two or three years, “Disillusion of the Empire.” I mean by disillusion of the empire, it’s time that we do something comparable to what the British did after World War II, get rid of something we no longer need that doesn’t help us, does not contribute one iota to national security, that has a waste of resources both human resources in the sense of our huge armed forces and, that is a way in which our scientific endeavors and things of this sort are today so deeply oriented toward military affairs, wars that aren’t going to happen, that we couldn’t win if we thought we could. It’s, I don’t quite know how to put it, it’s like living in a world that has packed up and moved on.
[RM]: Our guest, Chalmers Johnson, the author of the Blowback trilogy and the forthcoming “Disillusion of the Empire” from Metropolitan Books this summer. If not the leading, certainly in the first chair of experts on numerous military operations around the world, historically and through to the present day, and a main advocate of the new book “Dissolving the Empire.” You’ve been talking about the extent of the number of bases around the world. I think also the term “base” doesn’t register with a lot of American, especially those who haven’t been in the military. It might conjure up sort of a summer-camp image of like a barrack with a tin roof and a hundred guys sleeping in bunk beds. What is one of these bases actually like around the world?
[CJ]: Well, of course disillusion implies that it will happen of its own accord, it won’t. In fact what we see about these bases is that they often were created with a strategic purpose back in the Korean War, at the end of World War II, or in the numerous wars we have pursued since then. We’re building massive numbers of new bases in Afghanistan today that nothing dissolves of its own accord. That in fact they take on a life of their own, once they are built. No one is directly in charge of them. But they’re an attempt to create something like a rural American community in an utterly foreign neighborhood, where the troops have been propagandized in their training, in their preparation for locating to these areas, to believe that they are superior. That the people around them are dependent on them for their security. And it’s a dangerous, almost Roman, kind of view of the world that has developed over time, consequences of the cold war, of the contest of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was also driven to distraction and ultimately disillusion as a result of trying to keep up with this and keep up in this vigorous competition to create bases. They are literally bases. They are run by a military officer from the Pentagon. They are part of the various regional commands that are set up all over the world. The number of, I would say over 730, is from the base status report, which comes out annually. You could actually run this number up much higher, as it never includes the bases devoted to espionage. There are some bases that are simply not counted by the Pentagon for political reasons, particularly ones located in places like Israel, or some of the bases in the Balkans. Camp Bondsteel is an absolutely huge place located in Kosovo, it never appears in the base status report for reason that are unknown to me, but apparently our government simply doesn’t want to acknowledge that it uses this base. They’re often have purposes that go well beyond what they were originally set up for, that is to say, certainly Camp Bondsteel for example, it is associated with the possibility of building an oil pipeline across the Balkans. But they take on a life of their own. They include, of course, troops, dependants, schools, hospitals, all of the devices that dependence require. They have very large numbers of people. The CIA is invariably there. And it’s a cancer that will bring us down.
[RM]: Professor Chalmers Johnson, our guest today on Media Matters, and I’m your host Bob McChesney here at WILL AM 580. Our telephone number, if you’d like to call in with a question or comment for professor Johnson, is 333-9455. Our toll-free number is 1-800-222-9455. Professor Johnson, I’m wondering, how many other countries in the world have bases outside their own territory that they control like the United States does?
[CJ]: Well, certainly the British did at the height of the British empire, at the end of the 19th century. I would say that the diamond jubilee for Queen Victoria, it had maybe 35 to 40 naval bases around the world, that allowed them to deploy massive military forces. It was slowly bankrupting Great Britain, as we now know. But even so, the numbers are miniscule compared with the bases that we deploy at the present time. And the Russians had some, and that’s one of the things that brought the Russians down, particularly in East Europe, where they had bases throughout the so-called satellites, that had been created in the Stalinist era. But generally speaking, they do not have overseas bases. In fact, the American military base that we had at Mantra, Ecuador, the president of Ecuador said to the United States, when he asked that it be dissolved and it has now been eliminated, “I’ll let you keep it if you give me a base in New Jersey or Flordia, or something like that.” And, of course the Americans didn’t even answer. This is the kind of thing that goes on. It’s unthinkable that we should accept a Peruvian base in the United States, but there’s certainly nothing unthinkable about the fact that we might send some American troops down to Peru to show them how to dig holes.
[RM]: Well, Professor Johnson, I’m confused. Do you mean to tell me that China, for example, who is now held up as our main adversary or competitor, does not have a series of bases across Asia and South America and Africa?
[CJ]: No, of course not.
[RM]: Does it have any?
[CJ]: I don’t think they would be welcomed. No, not that I can think of any. A Chinese military base located, you know, in South America? It’s unimaginable.
[RM]: Well, why do countries put up with this? You mentioned Ecuador has sort of shut down the U.S. one. Its elected government, the president of which I might add, studied here at the University of Illinois…
[CJ]: Yes, he’s been quite good on many of these things. He’s rather funny at times, I think.
[RM]: But, why haven’t other countries said “get out of here” for the same reasons the president of Ecuador said “we don’t see what purpose you’re serving us.”
[CJ]: Primarily, economic relations with the United States. Not that they are that critical, or they couldn’t do without them, but that they are there, they are available, there’s no reason to antagonize the Americans. The Americans have recently set up an Africa command. This is a military command, nothing to do with our needs. But the military is involved here in trying to maintain dominance among a huge area of African nations in order to guarantee future supply of oil or other minerals that we believe we can’t do without, or that we couldn’t obtain in some other way than at the point of a rifle. But other nations don’t do that. It’s not necessary. The Chinese have demonstrated to the world that the resources they need, they can obtain very nicely, because they work hard on their economy. They really work on it, they just don’t define it. And they have got enough money to go around and simply buy properties, raw materials, things of this sort, around the world, and these create friendly diplomatic relations, of which the Chinese could expend regularly, but they do not do it at the point of a gun. They don’t do it through a department of so-called defense, which is farcical. They do it in other ways, in which they hope, they try to make the relationships reciprocal, to the extent that they are advantageous to China, they’re also advantageous to whatever the place may be, the Congo in Africa or whatever else, where the Chinese are actively investing. That’s the way it used to be done. That’s the way the Chinese are still doing it. The Chinese are exceeding magnificently at doing it.