Chalmers Johnson: Wake Up!

[reprehensor]

Wake Up!

The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the city of Ravenna. During the prime of the Roman Republic, roughly the last two centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting the heartland of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial armies. An ancient Roman law made it treason for any general to cross the Rubicon and enter Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar, Rome's most brilliant and successful general, stopped with his army at the Rubicon, contemplated what he was about to do, and then plunged south. The Republic exploded in civil war, Caesar became dictator and then in 44 B.C. was assassinated in the Roman Senate by politicians who saw themselves as ridding the Republic of a tyrant. However, Caesar's death generated even more civil war, which ended only in 27 B.C. when his grand nephew, Octavian, took the title Augustus Caesar, abolished the Republic and established a military dictatorship with himself as "emperor" for life. Thus ended the great Roman experiment with democracy. Ever since, the phrase "to cross the Rubicon" has been a metaphor for starting on a course of action from which there is no turning back. It refers to the taking of an irrevocable step.

I believe that on November 2, 2004, the United States crossed its own Rubicon. Until last year's presidential election, ordinary citizens could claim that our foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq, was George Bush's doing and that we had not voted for him. In 2000, Bush lost the popular vote and was appointed president by the Supreme Court. In 2004, he garnered 3.5 million more votes than John Kerry. The result is that Bush's war changed into America's war and his conduct of international relations became our own.

This is important because it raises the question of whether restoring sanity and prudence to American foreign policy is still possible. During the Watergate scandal of the early '70s, the president's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel John Dean for speaking too frankly to Congress about the felonies President Nixon had ordered. "John," he said, "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's very hard to get it back in." This homely warning by a former advertising executive who was to spend 18 months in prison for his own role in Watergate fairly accurately describes the situation of the United States after the reelection of George W. Bush.

James Weinstein, the founding editor of In These Times, recently posed for me the question "How should US foreign policy be changed so that the United States can play a more positive role on the world stage?" For me, this raises at least three different problems that are interrelated. The first must be solved before we can address the second, and the second has to be corrected before it even makes sense to take up the third.

more@link

[maxsolomon]

1. you go chalmers

i no longer have faith the the "christian" path will ever be taken in american foreign policy.

we need a 180 degree turn away from oil, and we need it 20 years ago. the danes (who are achieving energy independence on their own) would sell us all the technology we need, but they're "socialists", so we can't go there. the ant & the grasshopper.

america is doomed to reactionary politics for the remainder of my natural life.