Book review: The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson

I finished reading, at long last, Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire, which is a lovely history of American interventions abroad with the theme of, "We are engaging in imperialist behavior To This Day and it will ruin us." While it was written in 2003, and includes a heavy chunk of Bush Jr. and the Iraq wars, Johnson lays out century-old processes leading up to the sins of the Bush administration which make it hard to believe that, even had Obama aggressively pursued rapid turnaround, anything could change terribly rapidly with a new president. The extensive system of international bases (and bases to defend other bases, and bases to defend those bases...) alone would be tough for one man to shake up, and the spending amounts?

"For fiscal year 2004, the Department of Defense asked Congress for and received an increase to $379.3 billion, plus $15.6 billion for nuclear weapons programs administered by the Department of Energy and $1.2 billion for the Coast Guard...The message (Congress) sent seemed to be: No matter how much the United States spends on "defense," it will never be enough. The budget of the next-largest military spender, Russia, is only 14 percent of the U.S. total. The military budgets of the next twenty-seven highest spenders would have to be added together to equal our expenditures." (p. 306 - 307)

Well, who is a president to tell a deep-rooted institution like that it can't have nearly $400 billion dollars? By the way, the four "sorrows of empire," or consequences of the course Johnson saw us pursuing five years ago, are: perpetual war, leading to more anti-American terrorism and increased reliance by smaller nations on weapons of mass destruction; loss of democracy and constitutional rights as presidency continues to snatch power from Congress; loss of truthfulness (already "well-shredded") and a system of disinformation/propaganda to glorify war, power, military; lastly, financial ruin, as we fritter away more resources on military projects and neglect education, health, and domestic safety. Johnson had plenty of evidence suggesting these four were already well under way in 2003. I would say, in 2009, #1 and #4 are easily argued. As for #2 and #3? Worth thinking about.

This book was first introduced to me by prof. Joel Rogers in the sociology class that prompted me to add a sociology major to my journalism major. Joel "I believe in the Gettysburg Address and the Sermon on the Mount and half my students think I should be president and I direct the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and I make using empirical data to guide policy look really sexy" Rogers. Anyway, he gave us a couple chapters to read and I got angry but of course didn't have time to read the whole thing just then.

Coincidentally, Bill Moyers, hero of myself and 50 percent of living people I'd marry, just yesterday told his followers that Nemesis, the book which follows Sorrows in Johnson's three-part exploration of American foreign policy, is The One Book everyone should read this year. Just saying.