In the aftermath of "wartime president" George Bush's inglorious regime, and as we're gob-smacked with the realization our forces will remain in Iraq longer than Obama's promised end dates, it's useful to ruminate on just how much butter our guns are costing us.

Why, for instance, in this economically haggard nation, is it easier to talk about cutting "entitlements" like Social Security and Medicare than to mention reducing our far-flung, hysterically expensive military empire?

Oh... excuse me. Not "cutting" these benefits. Reforming. A term suitable in the same way "subdued" adequately describes the K-T asteroid hit.

Why do we have 700 bases dotting the globe, the pointless remnant of Cold War I, now concluded 20 years? As San Diego columnist Logan Jenkins points out, Rome and England got by with about 30 bases each. He quotes professor/author Chalmers Johnson, who saw the coming imperial collapse years ago in books like "Blowback":

"If we cannot cut back our long-standing, ever increasing military spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left." The Johnsons, it's fair to note, are unencumbered by children or stocks, two common articles of faith in the country's prosperity. Johnson's UC pension is secure. He can afford to cast a cold eye on the future.

"It's possible that it's over - and there's nothing to be done," he told me with a ghost of a smile.

We're the national equivalent of a zombie bank. A dead country walking. And we might not even know it.

Academics with secure pensions proffer cold comfort in this year of plummet, but he's right. Notes Jenkins: Though dismantling the military may be political suicide, a third-rail far more electrifying than Social Security, Obama will have to face that task someday... 

The military budget last year is estimated to total about $1 trillion, even with Bush's "Madoff accounting" procedures that juggle expenditures around the documented, public budget like Indian clubs and pineapples around a vaudeville gypsy.

To justify this webwork of patrols and itchy trigger fingers, the country must constantly sally forth to seek foreign dragons to engage. That was the motivation behind all the saber rattling during last summer's Russia-Georgia border skirmish. The way GOP candidate John McCain - and a distressing number of Democrats - would portray it, the Wehrmacht had just poured across the Polish border.

In these camps, the long, simmering conflict between the U.S. and what was then the Soviet Union attended fat times for the ominious construct President Eisenhower, in his final address to the nation, called the "military industrial complex". This was the bountiful research-and-deploy sugar tit that had evolved from our first overseas forays during and after our war with Spain, now a century ago, but reached a frightening climax following World War II, in our emergent, high-tech miasma of nuclear weapons and spacecraft.

But this network of expensive legionary camps has proven an unsuitable, unwieldy weapon against fighting civilian insurgencies. This is a lesson we should've learned with our previous major imperial debacle, the Vietnam War. That wasn't the classic colonization expedition of empires of yore; in that conflict, we contested ideologies in a strategic chess game with the Soviet Union. Despite shocking casualties estimated at over a million, the Vietnamese people emerged the victors. American foreign policy, liberal interventionists  - and especially the broken men who served as our disposable battle fodder there and back at home - lost.

Our "war on terror" adventure comes to us as just that: A classic imperial scheme dressed up with bullshit about "democracy promotion" and security. Or just plain vengeance. They hit us hard on 9/11, they're Arabs, sling them (as Michael Ledeen counseled) on the wall to show the world we mean business. But that modest little blueprint in oil access strategy and (where the neocons were concerned) guaranteed Israeli hegemony in the region turned out to be less classic expansionism and more classic over-reach. Our grand crusade may be the straw that breaks the overburdened camel's back.

Johnson paints a pessimistic picture in his latest book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic", summed up by the Publishers Weekly review:

Like ancient Rome, America is saddled with an empire that is fatally undermining its republican government, argues Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire), in this bleak jeremiad. He surveys the trappings of empire: the brutal war of choice in Iraq and other foreign interventions going back decades; the militarization of space; the hundreds of overseas U.S. military bases full of "swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape." At home, the growth of an "imperial presidency," with the CIA as its "private army," has culminated in the Bush administration's resort to warrantless wiretaps, torture, a "gulag" of secret CIA prisons and an unconstitutional arrogation of "dictatorial" powers, while a corrupt Congress bows like the Roman Senate to Caesar.

Retribution looms, the author warns, as the American economy, dependent on a bloated military-industrial complex and foreign borrowing, staggers toward bankruptcy, maybe a military coup. Johnson's is a biting, often effective indictment of some ugly and troubling features of America's foreign policy and domestic politics...

We're papering up a decrepit shack and calling it palatial. We can no longer hurtle down this road - no matter how powerful the forces pushing us to do so. It's time not just to end the ambiguous campaigns Iraq and Afghanistan, but at least begin shutting down all our bases sitting in sublime inactivity all over the world. Our service men and women spend their days in endless drill against an enemy that, for now, will not attack in the manner prescribed in their field manuals.

Let's do it. Now. As Rahm Emanuel points out, we're in a crisis. And crisis means... opportunity. As Robert Lovato writes, over at HuffPo:

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deserve much of the blame for the militaristic depredations that threaten the country and planet alike. But we ignore at our own risk the vast and well-rooted networks of political, military and economic interests that have long benefited from and enabled the machinations of empire. Our failure to push Obama to attack rather than promote U.S. militarism and empire will most certainly leave us vulnerable to a new era of "change," an era driven by the hydra-headed global dragon of free trade and militarism.

 

Bring them home. Shut it down. Now.