Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

This timely book from accomplished historian Johnson (Blowback) collects previously published articles that make succinct, hard-hitting attacks on what the author perceives as America's ruinous imperial follies. Johnson is especially critical of the U.S. penchant for covert operations run by the CIA—"the president's private army"—and its enthrallment to what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. For Johnson, the country's devotion to the "military Keynesianism" ascendant since WWII has not only caused untold and unnecessary damage at home and abroad but is "a form of slow economic suicide." His proposal to abolish the CIA and sell off the more than 700 military bases around the world may sound fanciful, but, Johnson insists, "Change is in the air." Indeed, he's no voice in the wilderness: recent movements across the Congressional aisle to drastically curb Pentagon spending suggest a new and serious attempt to address the problem so compellingly presented here. (Aug.)