War, Inc.

By Mike
Ferner

Revised June 7,
2008

Note to the revised version:
This article was first written for publication in December, 2001, weeks after
the U.S. started bombing
Afghanistan.  It appeared in the April 2002 issue of “Wild
Matters,” a national environmental journal Michael Colby published in Vermont.

When John Cusack’s film,
“War, Inc.” opened in June 2008, I considered suing him for stealing my title
and distorting the number of web hits for my “War, Inc.,” from a stable,
long-standing total of about a dozen, to a million and a half...but decided my
time could be better spent updating the original piece.

The initial purpose of War,
Inc. was to question why the U.S. chose to go to war after the
attacks of September 11, 2001.  One could
argue that other kinds of responses were possible, such as treating the attacks
as a criminal act instead of an act of war which, in any sense of how we
understand the word, they were not. 
Pursuing a criminal response would bring to bear the
intelligence-gathering forces of virtually the entire world, then in universal
sympathy with the United States, to arrest and try those responsible for the
attacks.  Leaving aside for a moment the
argument that a criminal investigation into the September 11 attacks would never
have been allowed since the federal government at the very least looked the
other way before the attacks took place, I think we can safely say the last
seven years prove that the path we chose – war – has generated far more innocent
victims, grieving families, ruined lives and overall problems for the U.S. than
had we sought justice without resorting to war. 

Which leaves open the
question, why did our government
choose to respond by invasion and war?

______________________

War,
Inc.

By Mike
Ferner

© 2002, 2008

"So what is our mistake? We
are also human beings. Treat us like human beings," Gulalae, a 37 year-old
Afghan mother, told the Toledo Blade
from the dust, hunger and fear of the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Pakistan.  She calls Osama bin Laden an “outsider” and
says that because of him, “Afghanistan is made into a hell for
others.”

Grim does not begin to
describe the conditions Gulalae and her family endure.  In one three-month period, in just one
portion of Shamshatoo, bacteria-related dehydration killed a child nearly every
day.  The misery in this refugee city is
like a grain of sand on the beach of suffering that is Afghanistan.  But Americans know little of it.     

If you
only watch mainstream press accounts you’d never know that within the first
three months of “America’s
New War,” civilian deaths from U.S. bombing in Afghanistan surpassed 3,700—more than
were killed in the attacks of September 11. 
The toll from unexploded cluster bombs, land mines, destroyed water and
sewer systems and depleted uranium shells will no doubt reach into the hundreds
of thousands.  Add the additional
innocents sure to die as the international cycle of violence continues, and our
war to end terrorism seems calculated to do just the opposite – which points to
a disturbing but plausible reason why we chose war: our government needs Osama
bin Laden, just like we needed the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. 

For a year
and a decade after the USSR dissolved in 1990, it looked
like we would have to settle for homosexuals as the national boogeymen, but al
Qaeda serves to crank up the armament budget much better than do
homosexuals.  We fool ourselves if we
deny there was considerable behind-closed-doors celebrating in the board rooms
of some of the biggest U.S.
corporations when a distinctly unpopular president decided to become a War
President and invade Afghanistan; then through the bloody logic of
empire, Iraq.

Before the
Evil Empire we had the Hun, the despicable Spaniards bombing the Maine before
that, and the murderous Mexicans were in the way when we wanted Texas.  Similar frights can be traced back through
the British Empire and earlier than that to the Gauls up in France whom Caesar
had to put to the sword to keep Rome safe. 
 

These days
government has much more sophisticated means of monitoring and spying on
citizens, so the two plums of power and control now sway temptingly before those
who would be our servants.  How likely is
it that without sufficient fright citizens would abide a PATRIOT Act, or
partially disrobe to board a plane, or shrug off wiretaps or multitudes of
surveillance cameras now invading city landscapes?

But returning for a moment
to the economic incentives for war, the following explains as well as any and
better than most: “War is a racket.  It
always has been…A racket is best described as something that is not what it
seems to the majority of people.  Only a
small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. 
It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the
very many.”

Words of a radical
peacenik?  Only if a Marine Corps Major
General qualifies as one.  In his
twilight years General Smedley Butler unburdened his soul as did other career
militarists, such as Admiral Hyman Rickover, who admitted that fathering the
nuclear Navy was a mistake and
Robert McNamara, who almost found the words to apologize for
overseeing the Viet
Nam
war.  Though unlike Rickover and
McNamara, Butler named names and
exposed for whom the system works. 

“I helped
make Mexico safe for American
oil interests in 1914” Butler wrote
in 1933. “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a
decent place for the National City
Bank boys to collect revenues in.  I
helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit
of Wall Street.  I helped purify
Nicaragua for the International
Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. 
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American
sugar interests in 1916.  I helped make
Honduras right for American fruit
companies in 1903.  In China
in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”  Butler acknowledged that he’d spent most of his
33 years in the Marines as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, Wall
Street and the bankers.  In short, I was
a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Thus did
Butler simply
and effectively expose a largely unknown truth—how the military serves the
interests of the propertied elite and their wealth-gathering machines, the
corporations.    

Perhaps
more commonly known is the corrupting practice of war profiteering. 

“...Only
twenty-four at the (Civil) war's beginning, (J. Pierpont) Morgan perceived from
the first that wars were for the shrewd to profit from and poor to die in,”
wrote Robert Boyer and Herbert Morais
in Labor’s Untold
Story.  “He received a tip that a
store of government-owned rifles had been condemned as defective and with the
simplicity of genius he bought them from the government for $17,500 on one day
and sold them back to the government on the next for $110,000...A Congressional
committee investigating his little deal said of him and other hijacking
profiteers, ‘Worse than traitors are the men who, pretending loyalty to the
flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the nation.’”

Lest we
think such traditions are no longer observed, consider the case of Eagle-Picher
Technologies Corp., producer of sophisticated batteries to power the guidance
systems of “smart” bombs.  Workers claim
they were ordered to cover up defects on millions of batteries – defects that
would ultimately cause guidance systems to fail. How many innocent civilians
were killed by bombs guided by defective Eagle-Picher Corp. batteries?       

Ignoring
the indictable war profiteers like J.P. Morgan, consider just one instance of
legal war profits and how they allow the few “inside the racket” to benefit
economically and politically – for generations – at the expense of the
many.  The du Pont Corporation will
suffice.

Compared
to some of its fellow racketeers, the du Pont Corporation’s profits during WWI
look downright patriotic.  The company
whose gunpowder saved the world for democracy saw its average annual pre-war
profit jump from $6,000,000 to
nearly 10 times that amount during the war. 

With this
wealth the du Pont family was able to buy nearly a quarter of all General Motors
Corporation stock by the mid-1920’s.  Not
only would that become a shrewd investment during GM’s successful campaign to
destroy urban mass transit systems, but who better than a du Pont to run
President Eisenhower’s Bureau of Public Roads and develop the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways
along with Eisenhower Defense Secretary (and former GM President), Charles
Wilson?  

If war
profits provide such a good return on investment, imagine how much planning goes
into winning the geostrategic spoils of war? 
For a peek inside this game there are few better tour guides than
President Carter’s National Security
Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. 

Having
also served on President Reagan’s Defense Department Commission on Integrated
Long-Term Strategy, Brzezinski was well-qualified to write his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and
Its Geostrategic Imperatives.  It’s
one of those books that beg the question, “why would anybody actually put this
stuff in writing?”  It also provides
useful documentation for those who find it more than a little odd that “Zbiggy”
has more recently joined critics of the war in Iraq.

Brzezinski
describes the Europe-Asia landmass as the key to global dominance.  He asserts that the fall of the Soviet Union
cleared the way for the U.S. to become the first non-Eurasian power to dominate
this critical area, “…and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how
long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is
sustained...”

In 1977 he
named the Central Asian “stans” as the next center of conflict for world
domination, and in light of expected Asian economic growth, he called this area
around the Caspian Sea “…infinitely more important as a potential economic
prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves…dwarf(ing)
those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea…in addition to important
minerals, including gold.”

The former
Reagan National Security Council
member reasoned: “It follows that America's primary interest is to help
ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that
the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.”

He further
deduced: “That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent
the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge
America's primacy.”  Leaving nothing to doubt, he clarified “…To
put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient
empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent
collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep
(satellites) pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming
together.”

For those
foolish enough to imagine planet Earth not being ruled by the
U.S., he warns that
"America's withdrawal from the
world—or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival—would produce
massive international instability.  It
would prompt global anarchy.”

Brzezinski
advises to “keep the barbarians from coming together,” and predicts “global
anarchy” if U.S. dominance is threatened.  The cold warrior’s language, while
picturesque, is not as precise as that used by Thomas Friedman, yet another
acolyte of empire who now wants to distance himself from a badly mismanaged
adventure in Iraq. 

The
foreign affairs columnist for the NY
Times in his much-hyped book, The
Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, wrote:  “Markets function and flourish only when
property rights are secure and can be enforced…And the hidden fist that keeps
the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine
Corps.”

With a
Silicon Valley reference, Friedman updates General Butler’s statement that “I
helped make Mexico safe for American oil
interests.”  Notwithstanding Friedman’s
update, oil retains its century-old rating as the imperial standard – now with
Afghanistan and Iraq at
center stage.  UNOCAL Corp. for one does
not hesitate to demand that Afghanistan be made safe for American
oil interests. “From the outset,” a
corporate executive testified to Congress in 1998, “we have made it clear
that construction of our proposed ($2.5 billion Afghanistan) pipeline cannot begin
until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of
governments, lenders and our company. 
UNOCAL envisions the creation of a
Central Asian Oil Pipeline Consortium…that will utilize and gather oil from
existing pipeline infrastructure in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia.”

Smedley
Butler learned that in war “nations acquire additional territory if they are
victorious.  They just take it.”  With leasing more in vogue than ever, getting
the use of additional territory – call it property –can be more profitable than
actually acquiring it.  But the end
result is the same.  “This newly acquired
territory is promptly exploited by the few,” Butler explained, “the self-same few who wrung
dollars out of blood in the war.  The
general public shoulders the bill.” 

A small
measure of historical perspective makes America’s latest war much less
surprising.  Yes, this time it’s
oil.  But as important as that commodity
is, it’s not oil alone for which we are killing.  It’s to insure that human rights are
subjugated to property rights.  Sometimes
we call property “oil,” sometimes we call it “land,” sometimes we call it “human
beings.”  The names change, but the song
remains the same throughout history.   

For
example, it is illuminating to read a few lines from our Constitution,
such as Article 4, Section 2.  Imbedded
in the most fundamental law of our land was the duty to return property in the
form of runaway slaves and indentured servants to the owners.  The Commerce Clause and the Supreme Court’s
interpretation of it has insured that property rights trump citizens’ rights to
govern themselves as described in the new expose, “Gaveling Down the Rabble.”  And nobody who works for a living needs a
source citation to tell them that corporations have more free speech rights than
human beings.  

That’s why the United
States government didn’t choose to seek justice
through a criminal prosecution after September 11.  Our government wasn’t interested in justice.  It was interested in empire and
property.  Some things never do change.

################

Ferner is author of “Inside the Red Zone: A
Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq.”