The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.
New York: Henry Holt and Company (Metropolitan Books, Owl Books), 2004.
Book information and other Links:
- Amazon.com
- The American Empire Project
- Wikipedia article about Chalmers Johnson
- Links to Articles by Chalmers Johnson
- Essay by Chalmers Johnson in Harper's Magazine, January 2007: "Republic or Empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States"
- TomDispatch.com Interview, March 2006:
Part 1, Our Military Empire
Part 2, Our Fading Republic - Interview, March 2007
- Closing the Collapse Gap by Dmitry Orlov - Empires do not last forever; perhaps the collapse of a fellow Cold War superpower, the Soviet Union, has some useful lessons for the United States' situation. I found Orlov's website from the website of the insightful James Howard Kunstler.
- U.S. Government documents:
National Security Strategy, September 2002
National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, December 2002 [PDF]
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD, known informally as the "Duelfer Report" on Iraq's WMD, September 2004
National Security Strategy, March 2006 - Transcript of a News Conference by President Bush, The Washington Post, 21 August 2006. In which he admits that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction:
"Now look, part of the reason we went into Iraq was -- the main reason we went into Iraq, at the time, was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction." - Senate Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, 109th Congress.
Report on Postwar Findings About Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare with Prewar Assessments together with Additional Views, [PDF] 8 September 2006.
Administration Ignores Senate Intel Report, Misleads America About Iraq/al-Qaeda Link, Think Progress, 21 September 2006. - The Neo-conservative agenda:
Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy
William Kristol and Robert Kagan
Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996.
Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,
A Report of the Project for the New American Century, September 2000.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm
Robert Kagan & William Kristol, eds. Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, Encounter Books, November 2000.
David Frum & Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Random House, December 2003.
Profile of Project for the New American Century
A U.S. war with Iraq had been on the neo-conservative agenda since at least 1996; now they want the U.S. to bomb Iran:
Craig Unger, From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq, Vanity Fair, March 2007. - Book review:
Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order
by G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004
A good companion to this book is the documentary film: Why We Fight (2005), which includes interviews with Chalmers Johnson, and is inspired in part by President Eisenhower's Farewell Address in which he warned of (among other things): a new "permanent armaments industry of vast proportion," the military-industrial complex: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Audio only at Michigan State University;
Text of Eisenhower's Farewell Address.
I have not found high quality video versions of the complete address at Google Video or YouTube.
Why We Fight information: IMDb, Amazon.com, RottenTomatoes.com, Wikipedia.
Some related Wikipedia articles:
Permanent war economy
American Empire
National Security Strategy of the United States
Bush Doctrine
Iraq Survey Group
Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction
State terrorism by the United States