Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire
Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire
And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
By Chalmers Johnson
However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.
These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony — that is, control or dominance — over as many nations on the planet as possible.
Continue reading: http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2009/07/30/three-good...
Empire
I would vote to removing our troops from Germany, and then signing a actual peace treaty with the German people. Considering the moral degradation Germany has suffered for allowing the Nazi regime to seize control and also considering the vile butchery and raping that was visited upon the German people after the war was over, I can not imagine a free and independent Germany ever allowing military aggression ever again. And we all know Germany does not need any-body's help defending it's self.
just a snarky thought
As an alternative to liquidating our empire, we could just own up to the reality of it. And then tax all the subjects in our empire!