Democracy's "death spiral"

In the reputed cause of keeping us safe, the Bush administration has gutted our defenses and left us more vulnerable than ever.

Is that merely some rabid charge thrown about by the irresponsible liberal blogosphere? No, that's the U.S. military talking, which goes even farther by depicting its readiness condition as a "death spiral."

In a perverse way, it's a good thing we're fighting them there, because we have very little to fight them with anywhere else, according to an eye-popping account from the Washington Post: "Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge."

Who, specifically, is this doomsaying band of brothers that sounds like the Bush-hating, Bush-bashing blogosphere in throwing around phrases like "death spiral"? Well, there's the Army chief of staff: "We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it." There's the Army's vice chief of staff, who describes his forces' readiness capability as "stark." And there's the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, who, when "asked last month by a House panel whether he was comfortable with the preparedness of Army units in the United States," replied bluntly, "No ... I am not comfortable."

"More troubling," the report continued, "is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover." In response the Pentagon has recommended the Army and Marine Corps' expansion by 92,000 troops. And that's just for starters.

But here's what's even more troubling to me and what seems like only a few others. The real death spiral we find ourselves in is more along the lines of what economist, historian and political scientist Chalmers Johnson gloomily outlines: something you might call "democracy's death spiral."

In an excellent, don't-miss interview with BuzzFlash.com, the Blowback-trilogy author goes back to the future with this profound and, I think, prophetic caveat: "History tells us there’s no more unstable, critical configuration than the combination of domestic democracy and foreign empire. You can be one or the other. You can be a democratic country, as we have claimed in the past to be, based on our Constitution. Or you can be an empire. But you can’t be both."

Yet "both" is what we're led to believe we're nobly pursuing, as we not only rebuild but now rapidly expand our military forces -- for our own good. And our "own good" will entail an ever-swelling military-industrial complex in support of an ever-inflating global fighting force engaged in increasingly numerous conflicts at deficit-bloating, economy-destroying costs.

Oh, and democracy-destroying costs, too. For empires demand unidimensional direction. They need one voice, one leader, one "decider." They cannot and will not tolerate 535 elected representatives and scores of constitutionally conscientious magistrates forcing their two-cents' worth into the mix. That system spells "messy" -- just about the only thing Donald Rumsfeld got right in six years -- and empires don't do messy. They are, rather, exceedingly unilinear in purpose and thought.

In the third of his trilogy, Nemesis, Professor Johnson writes that the United States "is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences."

That path is getting shorter by the day.