The problem is not Iraq. The problem is not Afghanistan. The problem is empire. The care and nourishment of the US empire requires that many soldiers be stationed around the globe—as of 2001, about 475,000 people at 725 bases from Iceland to Australia, according to Chalmers Johnson's calculation in The Sorrows of Empire.
Since the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign deployments have increased by at least 150,000, to an estimated total of nearly 650,000. The danger has increased too, with 1,744 now dead in the big war and 209 in the little war that refuses to simmer down. Sixteen died on Tuesday in Afghanistan when a helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade. There have been 54 American military deaths in that country so far this year, more than in all of 2004. They are dying for empire.
Why, 60 years after the end of World War II, does the US have 185,000 troops in Germany? Why, 16 years after the end of the Cold War, are there 89,000 in Japan? Germany and Japan do not have military bases on US soil. That would be thought bizarre, as Johnson points out in his earlier book Blowback, though such bases would make just as much strategic sense. The American bases are not thought bizarre, because American hegemony is considered a fact of life, an acceptable departure from the principle of national sovereignty. And therefore hardly worth noticing.
Many non-Americans do not find that hegemony acceptable, however, since the economic benefits of US bases are often outweighed by social and political dislocation, even when the US presence is not an overt occupation. Besides, people prefer to rule themselves. And at home, despite the sense of imperial militarism as normality, Americans suffer almost as much from ruling an empire as others suffer from being ruled. The cost is astronomical, $490 billion for the coming fiscal year, money that might be spent instead on education or healthcare.
But the worst cost to Americans is blowback, as Chalmers Johnson explains, "the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people." In his book of the same name, Johnson recounts the history of many instances of such secret actions in the last few decades, and the dangerous ways they have generated blowback. He names Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Afghanistan, and Iraq, along with many others, as places where America "reaps what it sows." But since the initial US actions are covert or the reasons for them are hidden, Americans often don't know what their government has done. As a result, they do not understand the violent reactions that often occur, the visible blowback. Americans wonder, "Why do they hate us?" Those who react suffer no such confusion; the secret history is not secret to them.
One of the clearest examples of blowback is the events of 9/11. In his revised introduction to Blowback (2003), Johnson writes:
The attacks of September 11 descend in a direct line from events in 1979, the year in which the CIA, with full presidential authority, began carrying out its largest ever clandestine operation—the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters (mujahideen) to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the Islamic world. Various members of the current Bush cabinet were complicit in generating the blowback of 9/11.
Powell, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were all involved. "Throughout the 1980s, these officials designed and implemented the secret war in Afghanistan and then, after the Soviet Union's withdrawal, made the decision to abandon America's Islamic agents." Among those agents, first supported with weapons and funds and later cut off cold, was Osama bin Laden. Angry at his rejection and appalled at the 35,000 "infidel" American troops in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden funded (if he did not plan) the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The unintended consequence—the blowback—of creating a force of mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan was the death and destruction of 9/11.
Empire requires a large military force, which breeds secrecy. The unknown and unaccountable actions of imperial operatives undermine democratic rule at home and create blowback around the world. The problem is exacerbated by a nonconscript, professionalized military, dispersed around the world, which naturally begins to be detached in perspective and goals from the civilian society is is supposed to defend. Johnson concludes:
World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century—that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post–Cold War world. U.S. administrations did what they thought they had to do in the Cold War years.… The United States likes to think of itself as the winner of the Cold War. In all probability, to those looking back a century hence, neither side will appear to have won, particularly if the United States maintains its present imperial course.
It's time to bring the troops home, all of them. Bring them home
from Germany and Japan, from Iceland and Australia, from Iraq and
Afghanistan. We do not need an empire—and if we insist on maintaining
one, the blowback will eventually be truly catastrophic. 
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