BOOK REVIEW
Nemesis The Last Days of the American Republic Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan Books: 356 pp., $26
By Tim RuttenTimes Staff Writer
January 31, 2007
PROPHECY is a tough gig.
The gods who let Cassandra see the future also decreed that no one would believe her. Foresight without credibility drove her mad. An idealistic young rabbi once surveyed his skeptical friends and neighbors from the bimah of their village synagogue and mournfully concluded that a prophet is never without honor — except in his own country.
Since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Chalmers Johnson, the distinguished scholar of East Asia, has assumed something close to the mantle of a contemporary Jeremiah. His 2000 book "Blowback" essentially predicted that U.S. covert intelligence activities abroad had unwittingly unleashed consequences that would threaten America's physical security. That anxiety was realized on that awful day in September, which made his subsequent volume "The Sorrows of Empire" mandatory reading. Now Johnson completes what he conceives as a trilogy with "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic."
This is an area in which Johnson is uniquely qualified to speak. Now 76 and an emeritus professor at UC San Diego, Johnson believed in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and helped to wage it — intellectually, as a formidable scholar of China and Japan, and more practically as an influential consultant to the CIA's Office of National Estimates.
The thesis proffered here is that, since the end of World War II, the United States has been undergoing a kind of creeping coup in which the growth of an imperial presidency, the development of the CIA as a secret presidential army, the bloating of an outsized military establishment, and a venal and derelict Congress have conspired to undermine the American republic — perhaps irremediably.
When Johnson mines the recent history he has studied and experienced firsthand, the results are bracing. Surveying the Bush administration's now 6-year-old campaign to reassert executive authority over the two co-equal branches of government, the author traces its origins back not only to Vice President Dick Cheney's well-known opposition to the War Powers Act of 1973 but also to his less widely understood antipathy to President Ford's executive order forbidding U.S. government employees to commit or to conspire in political assassinations. Johnson also cites the elder President Bush's anger that Congress had "unleashed a bunch of untutored little jerks" to investigate the CIA in the 1970s. As Johnson points out, the "little jerks" were those U.S. senators chaired by Frank Church (D-Idaho), whose historical investigation unearthed widespread abuses in the intelligence agencies.
As Johnson points out, all the legislation delineating executive powers that Cheney and the elder and younger Bushes find so burdensome "represented attempts to deal with crimes committed by government officials."
To Johnson, the struggle waged by the Bush-Cheney administration to turn back the clock on these issues is a "bald-faced assertion of presidential supremacy in all matters relating to foreign affairs dressed up in legalistic mumbo jumbo." It reached its nadir, the author suggests, in the now infamous memo that John Yoo, then a White House lawyer, wrote asserting the president's right to defy all U.S. laws and international treaties and to authorize torture as a tool of state policy.
"Yoo and company have concocted something that looks very much like an American version of the Chinese Communists' 'Two Whatevers,' " writes Johnson, an old China hand. "These were the basic principles that prevailed during the years when the cult of Mao Zedong was ascendant: 'We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao makes; and we will unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gives.' Substitute Bush for Mao and you get the idea."
There's never been a more apt or sobering description of the administration's conduct in this matter — or, for that matter, of the implications of the country's collective acquiescence to it.
Many of the conclusions Johnson teases from his shrewdly assembled and analyzed material are not so convincing.
For example, appropriating Hannah Arendt's description of Adolf Eichmann — "desk murderer" — and applying it to Cheney, George W. Bush and Donald H. Rumsfeld isn't just histrionic, it's wrong on the merits, wrong in ways so fundamental that it renders moral judgment itself a uselessly blunt instrument. However horrific events in Iraq have been, they have nothing in common with Hitlerian Germany's "final solution," and it does violence to both reason and history to carelessly suggest otherwise for mere effect.
On the other hand, when Johnson argues that America "will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon," he presents a case that demands consideration.
In his prologue, Johnson explains that he chose his title with folklorist Micha F. Lindemans' description of "Nemesis" in mind: "the goddess of divine justice and vengeance … [who] pursues the insolent and the wicked with inflexible vengeance." To Johnson, the goddess Nemesis is "a bit like Richard Wagner's Valkyrie Brünnhilde, except that Brünnhilde collects heroes, not fools and hypocrites. Nonetheless, Brünnhilde's way of announcing herself applies also to Nemesis…. 'Only the doomed see me.' "
Well, Northern European thought always has had an unfortunate penchant for determinism in much the same way that American thinking has recklessly indulged a cockeyed and ahistorical faith in our illusionary exceptionalism. It's always been hard to fathom, in fact, what it is about American nationality that seems to armor us against an authentic sense of tragedy.
Two wrongs, however, really don't make a right.
In his conclusion, Johnson argues that "to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent…. [The] combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire."
Some of that is true and important; parts of it just are not. For example, the imperial presidency is a threat to our democracy, but is the exercise — or mismanagement — of power in the unipolar world that has developed since the end of the Cold War really equivalent to, say, the late Roman or even British empires? There are parallels, of course, but not entirely applicable ones.
Similarly, it isn't as if this American democracy hasn't faced dire threats before. Certainly the Civil War was one, and Abraham Lincoln's assertion of presidential supremacy over civil liberties was as sweeping as anything George W. Bush has attempted — absent the grisly insistence on torture, of course. The republic came through that. (However, if another terrorist attack were to include damage on multiple cities with casualties exceeding those of Sept. 11, all bets would be off.)
Similarly, military dictatorships usually are imposed by successful military leaders — say, Caesar or Napoleon — who appear to offer their people clear advantages over other forms of leadership. President Bush is an abysmal military failure. The recent midterm knocked him rather forcefully off the white horse. Finally, there's the matter of the contemporary American officer corps itself. To have a successful military coup, you need a certain kind of military mind. Anybody who has spent any time around today's well-educated and thoughtful crop of commissioned and noncommissioned officers — particularly in the Army and Marine Corps — knows that their sophisticated realism and profound sense of their vocation's limits is a bulwark rather than a threat to democracy. It's their civilian leaders who have a problematic world view. If Bush had listened to the only real military man in his Cabinet, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the United States wouldn't now be mired in the Iraqi quagmire.
Still, these are serious arguments over serious issues, and Chalmers Johnson's important new book is something with which anyone who aspires to a worthwhile opinion about this country's future must now contend on terms at least as thoughtful as the author's.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
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