MetaFilter posts tagged with ChalmersJohnson

The 800-pound gorilla in the American living room

adamvasco — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:35:53 -0800

Dismantling the Empire.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of US military bases around the world, the Empire consists of 865 facilities deploying over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and overseas U.S. territories. 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.
(Related I & II).

US Military Presence Worldwide

homunculus — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:35:22 -0800

Mission Creep: "Bush and Rumsfeld may be history, but America's new global footprint lives on." Here's the Table of Contents for the whole series.

An Interview with Chalmers Johnson, Parts 1 & 2

y2karl — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 11:38:21 -0800

If we were having this conversation in 1985, and I had said to you, “Four years from now the Soviet Union will collapse and in six years it will disappear,” you would have thought, “This is not a reliable observer.” But the U.S.S.R. is gone -- disappeared -- and we didn’t predict it. Russia today is a much smaller country than the former Soviet Union. The CIA had all the wrong data. We also made a mistake when we concluded that we had won the Cold War. We had almost nothing to do with what happened in the Soviet Union: there were internal issues and it certainly wasn’t Star Wars. We now know in detail how Gorbachev brought Sakharov out of exile in Gorky to address the Politburo on, “What would you do about a ballistic missile defense?” Sakharov said, “It’s easy to overwhelm it with missiles. I wouldn’t spend a ruble on it.” And they didn’t. But in mistakenly thinking that we won the Cold War, we strongly imply that we did something to cause that. Instead, the Soviet Union collapsed because of overstretch, a case of imperial overstretch. An Empire of More Than 725 Military Bases
An interview with Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback and The Sorrows Of Empire (More Inside)