{"id":258422,"date":"2024-04-01T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2024-04-01T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=258422"},"modified":"2024-04-01T06:27:16","modified_gmt":"2024-04-01T05:27:16","slug":"evil-empire-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/04\/evil-empire-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Evil Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for the USA?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

31 Mar 2024<\/em> – In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.<\/p>\n

According to an NBC News\/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration\u2019s policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term \u2014 and lost. What people don\u2019t agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy \u2014 or remedies \u2014 ought to be.<\/p>\n

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times<\/em> reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.<\/p>\n

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism<\/em>, puts it: \u201cNone of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances\u2026 The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.\u201d<\/p>\n

George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him \u201cto protect and defend the constitution,\u201d and the opposition party has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to account. Among the \u201chigh crimes and misdemeanors\u201d that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq\u2019s nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world.<\/p>\n

Nothing in the Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nonetheless, within days after the 9\/11 attacks, President Bush had signed a secret executive order authorizing a new policy of \u201cextraordinary rendition,\u201d in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries like Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing.<\/p>\n

On the home front, despite the post-9\/11 congressional authorization of new surveillance powers to the administration, its officials chose to ignore these and, on its own initiative, undertook extensive spying on American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and without reporting to Congress on this program. These actions are prima-facie<\/em> violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution.<\/p>\n

These alone constitute more than adequate grounds for impeachment, while hardly scratching the surface. And yet, on the eve of the national elections of November 2006, then House Minority Leader, now Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pledged on the CBS News program \u201c60 Minutes\u201d that \u201cimpeachment is off the table.\u201d She called it \u201ca waste of time.\u201d And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques\u201d on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.<\/p>\n

Promoting Lies, Demoting Democracy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Without question, the administration\u2019s catastrophic war in Iraq is the single overarching issue that has convinced a large majority of Americans that the country is \u201cheading in the wrong direction.\u201d But the war itself is the outcome of an imperial presidency and the abject failure of Congress to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight. Had the government been working as the authors of the Constitution intended, the war could not have occurred. Even now, the Democratic majority remains reluctant to use its power of the purse to cut off funding for the war, thereby ending the American occupation of Iraq and starting to curtail the ever-growing power of the military-industrial complex.<\/p>\n

One major problem of the American social and political system is the failure of the press, especially television news, to inform the public about the true breadth of the unconstitutional activities of the executive branch. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror<\/em>, observe, \u201cFor the public to play its proper checking role at the ballot box, citizens must know what is done by the government in their names.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat\u2019s most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not \u2014 and could not \u2014 occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives \u2014 including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment \u2014 essentially hijacked the government.<\/p>\n

Some respected professional journalists do not see these failings as the mere result of personal turpitude but rather as deep structural and cultural problems within the American system as it exists today. In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America\u2019s leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way:<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the institutions we thought would protect us \u2014 particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress \u2014 they have failed So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn\u2019t. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that\u2019s the most glaring. What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You\u2019d have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Veteran analyst of the press (and former presidential press secretary), Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment of media failure, concluded: \u201cThe disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell\u2019s presentation at the United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student\u2019s thesis, downloaded from the Web \u2014 with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with \u2018plagiarism.’\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result of such multiple failures (still ongoing), the executive branch easily misled the American public.<\/p>\n

A Made-in-America Human Catastrophe<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that of the military is particularly striking, resembling as it does the failures of the Vietnam era, thirty-plus years earlier. One would have thought the high command had learned some lessons from the defeat of 1975. Instead, it once again went to war pumped up on our own propaganda \u2014 especially the conjoined beliefs that the United States was the \u201cindispensable nation,\u201d the \u201clone superpower,\u201d and the \u201cvictor\u201d in the Cold War; and that it was a new Rome the likes of which the world had never seen, possessing as it did \u2014 from the heavens to the remotest spot on the planet \u2014 \u201cfull spectrum dominance.\u201d The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble \u2014 as it did \u2014 and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan).<\/p>\n

Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country \u2014 especially, in this case, Baghdad\u2019s National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.<\/p>\n

According to Andrew Bacevich, \u201cNext to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there.\u201d Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, says of President Bush\u2019s recent \u201csurge\u201d strategy in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province: \u201cThe reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Symbolically, a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported<\/a>, was finally giving up and going into exile \u2014 joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote:<\/p>\n

***\u201dThere are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends\u2026. And to what?\u201d<\/p>\n

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a consistent cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently radically changed his tune. He now says, \u201cNo Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection.\u201d In a different context, Gen. McCaffrey has concluded: \u201cThe U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an endless web of lies and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon, military pundits, and the now-routine reporting of propagandists disguised as journalists. For example, in the first months of 2007, rising car-bomb attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery of Bush administration and Pentagon claims that the U.S. troop escalation in the capital had brought about \u201ca dramatic drop in sectarian violence.\u201d The official response to this problem: the Pentagon simply quit including<\/a> deaths from car bombings in its count of sectarian casualties. (It has never attempted to report civilian casualties publicly or accurately.) Since August 2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One study estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from these alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis.<\/p>\n

The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet<\/em>, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war. The British and American governments at first dismissed the findings, claiming the research was based on faulty statistical methods \u2014 and the American media ignored the study, played down its importance, or dismissed its figures.<\/p>\n

On March 27, 2007, however, it was revealed that the chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, had offered a more honest response. The methods used in the study were, he wrote, \u201cclose to best practice.\u201d Another British official described them as \u201ca tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.\u201d Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million \u2014 that is, one in every 45 individuals \u2014 amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe.<\/p>\n

One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans\u2019 mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed \u201crag heads\u201d or \u201chajis\u201d as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army\u2019s Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune<\/em>. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.<\/p>\n

The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many other aspects of imperialism and militarism are undermining America\u2019s Constitutional system. By now, for example, the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies \u2014 and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts. Any accounting of these funds, largely distributed to crony companies with insider connections, is chaotic at best. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World\u2019s Most Powerful Mercenary Army<\/em>, estimates that there are 126,000 private military contractors in Iraq, more than enough to keep the war going, even if most official U.S. troops were withdrawn. \u201cFrom the beginning,\u201d Scahill writes, \u201cthese contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq.\u201d<\/p>\n

America\u2019s massive \u201cmilitary\u201d budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world\u2019s largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment \u2014 sometimes mislabeled \u201cdefense spending\u201d \u2014 has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan\u2019s weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar.<\/p>\n

Equally alarming, it is virtually impossible for a member of Congress or an ordinary citizen to obtain even a modest handle on the actual size of military spending or its impact on the structure and functioning of our economic system. Some $30 billion of the official Defense Department (DoD) appropriation in the current fiscal year is \u201cblack,\u201d meaning that it is allegedly going for highly classified projects. Even the open DoD budget receives only perfunctory scrutiny because members of Congress, seeking lucrative defense contracts for their districts, have mutually beneficial relationships with defense contractors and the Pentagon. President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified this phenomenon, in the draft version of his 1961 farewell address, as the \u201cmilitary-industrial-congressional complex.\u201d Forty-six years later, in a way even Eisenhower probably couldn\u2019t have imagined, the defense budget is beyond serious congressional oversight or control.<\/p>\n

The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department. For fiscal year 2006, Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute calculated national security outlays at almost a trillion dollars \u2014 $934.9 billion to be exact \u2014 broken down as follows (in billions of dollars):<\/p>\n

Department of Defense: $499.4
\nDepartment of Energy (atomic weapons): $16.6
\nDepartment of State (foreign military aid): $25.3
\nDepartment of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded soldiers): $69.8
\nDepartment of Homeland Security (actual defense): $69.1
\nDepartment of Justice (1\/3rd for the FBI): $1.9
\nDepartment of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5
\nNASA (satellite launches): $7.6
\nInterest on war debts, 1916-present: $206.7<\/p>\n

Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.<\/p>\n

This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on \u201cthe economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending.\u201d Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we\u2019ve experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year.<\/p>\n

Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, \u201cMost economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Imperial Liquidation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of our republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what\u2019s left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline.<\/p>\n

I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic \u2014 becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.<\/p>\n

For the U.S., the decision to mount such a campaign of imperial liquidation may already come too late, given the vast and deeply entrenched interests of the military-industrial complex. To succeed, such an endeavor might virtually require a revolutionary mobilization of the American citizenry, one at least comparable to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire \u2014 something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered \u2014 we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all<\/em> our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities.<\/p>\n

In the words of Noam Chomsky, a venerable critic of American imperialism: \u201cWhere spending is rising, as in military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. Where spending is steady or declining (health, education, job training, the promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply increase. Bush\u2019s tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 a year would be immediately rescinded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.<\/p>\n

Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements \u2014 those American-dictated \u201cagreements\u201d that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege.<\/p>\n

The American approach to diplomatic relations with the rest of the world would also require a major overhaul. We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world\u2019s largest supplier of arms and munitions \u2014 a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return to leading by example \u2014 and by sound arguments \u2014 rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.<\/p>\n

In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence. We should eliminate as much secrecy as possible so that neither the CIA, nor any other comparable organization ever again becomes the president\u2019s private army.<\/p>\n

In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide<\/a> its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of \u201cfree trade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Normally, a proposed list of reforms like this would simply be rejected as utopian. I understand this reaction. I do want to stress, however, that failure to undertake such reforms would mean condemning the United States to the fate that befell the Roman Republic and all other empires since then. That is why I gave my book Nemesis<\/em><\/a> the subtitle \u201cThe Last Days of the American Republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase \u201cevil empire,\u201d he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will \u201cwin\u201d or \u2014 even more improbably \u2014 \u201cfollow us home.\u201d I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, \u201cWe have met the enemy and he is us.\u201d<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chalmers Johnson was a retired professor of Asian Studies at the University of California, San Diego. From 1968 until 1972 he served as a consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency. His books, from\u00a0<\/em>Blowback<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0<\/em>Dismantling the Empire: America\u2019s Last Best Hope<\/a>\u00a0are now classics. In 2006, he appeared in the prize-winning documentary film\u00a0<\/em>Why We Fight.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2024 Chalmers Johnson<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

31 Mar 2024 – Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for the USA? In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":156451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,1161,1126,1050,112,2200,95,1594,481],"class_list":["post-258422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-arms-industry","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-pentagon","tag-us-empire","tag-us-military","tag-war-economy","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258424,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258422\/revisions\/258424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}