Letter to My Children’s Children’s Children On the End of Republican Government

Commentary

By Marvin Chachere

In thinking about what I ought to tell you regarding these dark days various clichés come to mind: I see no light at the end of the tunnel. The American dream is a nightmare. The American experiment failed. Pride precedeth the fall.

To witness the death of our representative form of government is to feel some of the stages of grief identified by Dr. Kubler-Ross in her landmark study: disbelief, anger, despair… acceptance.

I found it unbelievable that our republic would spill out into the entire globe and, repeating the life-cycle of empires like Rome and Great Britain, our unmatched strength, confidence and conceit would lead to a sense of invincibility from which we stumbled, matured, grew old and collapsed.

Halfway through my eighth decade a surge of books came out that I encourage you to access on your PCs for they contain the reasons for my incredulity. Collectively they describe a nation in deep trouble; the ship of state constructed around the time of the first steam engine could not hold course in capricious modern winds driven by personal enrichment, societal neglect and king-of-the-hill foreign policies. For example, in a category on ominous forebodings of our global entanglements you can download Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy, Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis and in a different class you can scan Noam Chomsky’s densely crafted Hegemony or Survival in which sharp facts strip naked the current administration’s born-again royal clothing, or click onto Jeremy Scahill’s revelations that a large mercenary army assisted in the catastrophic occupation of Iraq, unregulated and unconstrained.

In general, the nation failed so often and so shamelessly to live up to the promises of its birth that it adjusted those lofty promises bit by bit to fit the nefarious goals it pursued on the back of an almighty “military-industrial complex.” Abandon republican ideals and you abandon republican government.

And if you go further into our past you will notice that our new way of governing—three separate and independent branches held together by checks and balances—though interesting and admirable was not effective or practical. The government prescribed by the Constitution failed its first critical test; it could not solve the problem of slavery peacefully, and thus we slipped into a civil war that nearly destroyed us. The residue of that bloodiest of all our wars still exists, and the Katrina disaster’s racial one-sidedness and the government’s ineptitude intensified my anger.

You might also notice that the impracticality of our new form of governing explains why most new nations formed after World War II did not copy us but formed governments of a parliamentary nature.

That the United States called itself America, contrary to geographical fact, foretells its overarching self-regard. We replaced the Monroe Doctrine with a program to convert the world to our ideals and eventually to dominate and rule it. Republicanism and imperialism are incompatible.

There were subtle warning signs. At the same time that terrorists replaced communists in the fear-mongering, “barbarians at the gates” instrument for tightening regulations and controls, the government’s infatuation with security caused unprecedented and pervasive secrecy, and secrecy is toxic because governance that is not open is not republican.

There were more explicit signs. Less than half of eligible voters bothered to do so, their customary indifference being validated when, despite having received half a million fewer votes than his opponent, the 43rd president attained office by virtue of one vote by a Supreme Court judge. Despair arrived the day Bush II was elected to a second term—“How could 59 million voters be so stupid?” headlined the UK Daily Mirror—and depression set in when international rules against torture were deemed “quaint” and outdated.

Other harbingers of danger included the expanding economic chasm—the poor grew poorer, the well-off grew richer and the rich got super rich. (CE0s of top companies were compensated 475 times more than their employees, on average.) Faith, more than deeds, became the hallmark of morality. Reason was subdued by religion, and science was subverted by it. Everything of value had monetary value. Lobbyists with deep pockets outnumbered legislators two to one. Every problem prompted a legislative solution and every solution was ultimately sanctioned, or not, by the courts. Any person with superior marketing apparatus and enough money could be elected to any office at any level (and thereby improve his/her lot, financially).

Every day my depression was deepened by the repeated and unqualified use of the term “war”—“war on terror,” “War Powers Act,” “war crimes,” “war zone,” etc. Sure, we have a well equipped military force occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Our troops are killing and being killed. But how could there be a war when the enemy had no uniform, no flag, no unified command and whose most devastating weapons were improvised human and home-made non-human explosive devises?

Finally, life and liberty, once believed to be unalienable rights endowed by our Creator, were destroyed by two laws enacted by the 109th Congress: the renewal of the perversely named Patriot Act and the barbaric Military Commissions Act; the former silenced domestic dissenters and the latter dealt with foreign dissenters as “enemy combatants” denying them both legal and human rights.

The early weeks of the 110th Congress, for a variety of political reasons, sounded the death knell of the republic. Let the following stand for the multifaceted disintegration I have just summarized; it is the source of my depression and the reason for this letter.

In early spring 2007, both houses of Congress passed resolutions, just barely, that urged but did not require the president to prepare to withdraw our troops from the catastrophe he’d created in Iraq. Democratic party leaders boasted that they were taking back powers ceded to Mr. Bush when his party held a majority of seats.

The media feigned alarm—a constitutional crisis! legislative branch versus executive branch!—and delighted in speculations regarding the high political price of confrontation—who will win, what are the loses? Meanwhile, Bush, on the defensive, bullied his opponents, called them irresponsible and accused them of interfering; they dishonored our soldiers, he declared, and emboldened our enemies.

Often appearances hide the truth and just as often a small victory hides a large defeat.

Properly understood, both the nay and yea votes on resolutions setting a time-table for withdrawal from Iraq implicitly concede that the nation’s honor (if there was any) was worth deaths and dismemberments in the tens of thousands, casualties bound to accumulate while Congress and the White House squabbled. Nothing in my time signaled the demise of the republic as surely as this, as if more blood would restore our honor.

Reviewing what I have written, I confess that I have not achieved acceptance, the final stage of grief, and, truth be told, I don’t ever expect to.

Marvin Chachere is a San Pablo resident.

Budget cuts to feed the war machine

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Bush’s scorched-earth budget
The cuts to feed the war machine

By Sharon Smith | February 23, 2007 | Page 9

BUSH’S BUDGET proposal for FY 2008 is emblematic of the social crisis unfolding inside the U.S. empire, its ramifications still largely ignored in mainstream politics. Coupled with whopping military expenditures and permanent tax cuts for the extraordinarily wealthy, Bush’s budget shreds what little remains of the tattered social safety net for the most downtrodden members of the world’s richest society.

The Iraq war marks the first major war in the last 100 years fought in the interests of America’s ruling elite without even the pretense of “shared sacrifice.”

During the First World War, the tax rate for top income earners stood at 77 percent; during the Second World War, at 94 percent. Even during Vietnam, the wealthiest taxpayers faced a rate of 70 percent on personal income.

Yet as the bloodletting in Iraq has been proven a war for nothing more than U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil, the corporate class continues to enjoy an income tax rate that has been capped at only 35 percent since 2003--the year the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Bush’s plan to permanently extend these tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010, would cost an estimated $211 billion in 2012 and $1.6 trillion over the next decade. Added to their profit windfalls and soaring executive salaries, the corporate class has every reason to celebrate.

Bush’s budget makes clear that the growing numbers of economically disadvantaged Americans--already supplying the cannon fodder sent to kill and die in Iraq and Afghanistan--must also continue to shoulder the suffocating financial burden for U.S. imperialism’s 21st century follies.

Bush’s budget proposal brazenly takes aim at veterans themselves, nearly doubling their out-of-pocket fees from $8 to $15 for prescription medications when they return home from a war zone battered and traumatized, and often looking for work.

In this war, only the working class is expected to sacrifice. On January 14, the New York Times interviewed the family of Sgt. Andrew DeBlock, a 41-year-old member of the New Jersey National Guard who recently learned that his stay in Iraq was extended by four months due to Bush’s troop surge.

His wife, Heidi DeBlock, told Times reporters that due to the her husband’s lost income, she “has had to battle her heating-fuel company, which wanted cash up front, and her husband’s cell phone provider, which will not let him out of his contract even though he is off fighting a war.”

Bush’s budget reduces Medicare and Medicaid spending by $102 billion over the next five years. Food stamps would be slashed to the bone, dropping some 300,000 currently eligible recipients. The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides food for more than 450,000 low-income seniors, would be completely eliminated.

Bush also proposes gutting $300 million in funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and over $3.6 billion from special education programs in public schools. And these are just the highlights.

Bush did, however, manage to find the money to substantially increase funds for sexual abstinence education for 12- to 18-year-olds--rising to $191 million, an increase of $28 million from last year’s budget.

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BECKY OGLE, senior adviser on disability to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), argued of Bush’s proposal: “Last November, the American people went to the polls and demanded a new direction for America. President Bush’s misplaced budget priorities represent more of the same failed leadership that the American people have already rejected. With Congress under Democratic control, we can finally have real leadership that reflects the values and priorities of all Americans.”

While voters’ expectations for change are high, Congressional Democrats have thus far shown reluctance to chart anything resembling the “new direction” to which Ogle refers.

Senate Democrats’ inability to win even a non-binding resolution on the Iraq war does not bode well for the upcoming budget battle. Democrats blamed Republicans for maneuvering to block the resolution.

In reality, Republicans called the Democrats’ bluff by insisting that the symbolic resolution be accompanied by a binding vote on continued funding for the war. War funding would have passed with Democratic votes, neutralizing the Democrats’ smoke-and-mirrors efforts to appease their antiwar supporters.

On the domestic front, Democrats have shown no willingness to do more than tinker with the most egregious symptoms of the economic crisis facing the U.S. working-class majority. Roughly 45 percent of American workers now earn $13.25 an hour or less, while 58 percent work for less than $15 an hour. The fastest growing occupations in the U.S. are janitor, hospital orderly and cashier.

During their widely trumpeted first 100 hours, Democrats did spearhead legislation to raise the minimum wage, and pledged to restore cuts from heating subsidies and Head Start programs for the poor.

But raising the minimum wage--which has remained in place at $5.15 an hour for the last decade--to $7.25 does not begin to reverse the race to the bottom in working-class wages, since the typical wage is worth less today than it was in 1972, and real wages have fallen steadily over the last four years of economic “recovery.”

Similarly, Democrats proposed raising Pell Grants for low-income college students from $4,050 (frozen for the last five years) to $4,300. Bush’s own budget proposal surpasses the Democrats,’ raising Pell grants to $4,600 in fiscal year 2008 and to $5,400 by 2012.

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AS THE Times commented on February 5, “While Democrats criticized Mr. Bush for what the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, called ‘wrong priorities,’ they conceded privately that Mr. Bush was correct in warning that the unchecked growth of entitlement programs would eventually break the federal bank.”

Congressional Democrats have yet to confront the elephant in the room: Bush’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy during an imperial war.

Why are they so timid in the face of a seismic shift in popular opinion, winning them a majority in both Houses of Congress in November? The answer is straightforward: the 2008 presidential campaign is already underway, and Democrats plan to continue their centrist path to victory, focusing on would-be Republican voters, secure in the knowledge that the overwhelming majority of progressives will vote Democrat, however little they get in return.

As Mike Davis argued recently in New Left Review, “In practice, this translates not simply into a Democratic reluctance to undertake new spending, but also a refusal to debate the rollback of any of Bush’s $1 trillion in tax cuts for the affluent. ‘Tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend’, Senator Kent Conrad (chair of the Budget Committee) told the New York Times, ‘we’re not going there.’”

The Times stated on February 6, “But few Democrats are expected to look for new revenues by calling for an end to Bush's tax cuts, instead of extending them as the president proposed Monday...

“Since 2001, Democratic leaders have made a point of saying the Bush tax cuts are unfairly weighted toward the wealthy and dangerous to American solvency. But the tax cuts expire in 2010, and Democrats acknowledge that they are not ready to move on them now.”

In addition, Democrats are open to negotiations with Bush on future Social Security benefits, “possibly with a curb on some benefits,” the Times added.

“Bipartisanship” is the watchword of the new Democratic majority in Congress. But this is not a new strategy. Democrats have been eager bipartisans for the last 30 years--enabling Reagan’s tax cuts, Clinton’s gutting of “welfare as we know it” and all of George W. Bush’s legislation, including the Patriot Act, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and, yes, Bush’s tax cuts.

The neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) remains firmly in control of the Democratic Party, personified by their presidential frontrunner, Sen. Hillary Clinton. The word “poverty” never passes her lips.

During a recently staged “conversation with Iowans,” Clinton asked what health insurance system her audience preferred. “Overwhelmingly, the audience favored moving toward a Medicare-like system for all Americans,” the Washington Post reported.

Yet Clinton remained noncommittal about any forthcoming policy pledge for the nation’s 47 million uninsured. She told her Iowa audience, “I’m not ready to be specific until I hear from people.”

Expect no major progress from Democratic Party powerbrokers until the angry electorate that swept them into power in November begins to hold them accountable for their actions--and inactions.

Why the US Is Not Leaving Iraq

Jan 10, 2006

It is crucially important that public attention is shifted away from the confining official narrative of the war, parroted by the corporate media and political pundits, to the economic crimes that have been committed because of this war, notes Ismael Hossein-zadeh.


“The military-industrial-complex [would] cause military spending to be driven not by national security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists and elected officials.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.” — General Smedley D. Butler.


Neither the Iraq Study Group nor other establishment critics of the Iraq war are calling for the withdrawal of US troops from that country. To the extent that the Study Group or the new Congress purport to inject some “realism” into the Iraq policy, such projected modifications do not seem to amount to more than changing the drivers of the US war machine without changing its destination, or objectives: control of Iraq’s political and economic policies.

In light of fact that by now almost all of the factions of the ruling circles, including the White House and the neoconservative war-mongerers, acknowledge the failure of the Iraq war, why, then, do they balk at the idea of pulling the troops out of that country?

Perhaps the shortest path to a relatively satisfactory answer would be to follow the money. The fact is that not everyone is losing in Iraq. Indeed, while the Bush administration’s wars of choice have brought unnecessary death, destruction, and disaster to millions, including many from the Unites States, they have also brought fortunes and prosperity to war profiteers. At the heart of the reluctance to withdraw from Iraq lies the profiteers’ unwillingness to give up further fortunes and spoils of war.

Pentagon contractors constitute the overwhelming majority of these profiteers. They include not only the giant manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, but also a complex maze of over 100,000 service contractors and sub-contractors such as private army or security corporations and “reconstruction” firms.[1] These contractors of both deconstruction and “reconstruction,” whose profits come mainly from the US treasury, have handsomely profited from the Bush administration’s wars of choice.

A time-honored proverb maintains that wars abroad are often continuations of wars at home. Accordingly, recent US wars abroad seem to be largely reflections of domestic fights over national resources, or public finance: opponents of social spending are using the escalating Pentagon budget (in combination with drastic tax cuts for the wealthy) as a cynical and roundabout way of redistributing national income in favor of the wealthy. As this combination of increasing military spending and decreasing tax liabilities of the wealthy creates wide gaps in the Federal budget, it then justifies the slashing of non-military public spending—a subtle and insidious policy of reversing the New Deal reforms, a policy that, incidentally, started under President Ronald Reagan.

Meanwhile, the American people are sidetracked into a debate over the grim consequences of a “pre-mature” withdrawal of US troops from Iraq: further deterioration of the raging civil war, the unraveling of the “fledgling democracy,” the resultant serious blow to the power and prestige of the United States, and the like.

Such concerns are secondary to the booming business of war profiteers and, more generally, to the lure or the prospects of controlling Iraq’s politics and economics. Powerful beneficiaries of war dividends, who are often indistinguishable from the policy makers who pushed for the invasion of Iraq, have been pocketing hundreds of billions of dollars by virtue of war. More than anything else, it is the pursuit and the safeguarding of those plentiful spoils of war that are keeping US troops in Iraq.

(Because the role of oil is discussed extensively by many other researchers and writers, I would focus here on the role of the Pentagon contractors, both as a major driving force to the war on Iraq and a major obstacle in the way of withdrawing from that country.)

The rise of the fortunes of the major Pentagon contractors can be measured, in part, by the growth of the Pentagon budget since President George W. Bush arrived in the White House: it has grown by more than 50 percent, from nearly $300 billion in 2001 to almost $455 billion in 2007. (These figures do not include the Homeland Security budget, which is $33 billion for the 2007 fiscal year alone, and the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fast approaching $400 billion.)

Large Pentagon contractors have been the main beneficiaries of this windfall. For example, a 2004 study by The Center for Public Integrity revealed that, for the 1998–2003 period, one percent of the biggest contractors won 80 percent of all defense contracting dollars. The top ten got 38 percent of all the money. Lockheed Martin topped the list at $94 billion, Boeing was second with $81 billion, Raytheon was third (just under $40 billion), followed by Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics with nearly $34 billion each.[2]

Fantastic returns to these armaments conglomerates have been reflected in the continuing jump in the value of their shares or stocks in the Wall Street: “Shares of U.S. defense companies, which have nearly trebled since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq, show no signs of slowing down. . . . All the defense companies—with very few exceptions—have been doing extremely well with mostly double-digit earnings growth. . . . The feeling that makers of ships, planes and weapons are just getting into their stride has driven shares of leading Pentagon contractors Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., and General Dynamics Corp. to all-time highs. . . .”[3]

Major beneficiaries of war dividends include not only the giant manufacturing contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, but also a whole host of other war-induced service contractors that have mushroomed around the Pentagon and the Homeland Security apparatus in order to cash in on the Pentagon’s spending bonanza.

A highly profitable and fast growing industry that has evolved out of the Pentagon’s tendency to shower private contractors with tax-payers’ money is based on its increasing practice of the outsourcing of the many of the traditional military services to private businesses. “In 1984, almost two-thirds of [the Pentagon’s] contracting budget went for products rather than services. . . . By fiscal year 2003, 56 percent of Defense Department contracts paid for services rather than goods.”

What is more, these services are not limited to the relatively simple or routine tasks and responsibilities such food and sanitation services or building maintenance. More importantly, they include “contracts for services that are highly sophisticated, strategic in nature, and closely approaching core functions that for good reason the government used to do on its own. The Pentagon has even hired contractors to advise it on hiring contractors.”[4]

Private security contracting, a lucrative and rapidly growing industry, is a good example of the Pentagon’s policy of outsourcing. These contractors operate on the periphery of U.S. foreign policy by training foreign “security forces,” or by “fighting terrorism.” Often these private military corporations are formed by retired Special Forces personnel seeking to market their military expertise to the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, or foreign governments.

For example, MPRI, one of the largest and most active of these firms, which “has trained militaries throughout the world under contract to the Pentagon,” was founded by former Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono and seven other retired generals. The fortunes of these military training contractors, or modern-day mercenary companies, like those of the manufacturers of military hardware, have skyrocketed by virtue of heightened war and militarism under President George W. Bush. For example, “The per share price of stocks in L3 Communications, which owns MPRI, has more than doubled.”[5]

As the Pentagon’s manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin make fortunes through the production of the means of death and destruction, they also create profit opportunities for service contractors such as Halliburton that, like vultures, follow the plumes of the smoke of deconstruction and set up shop for “reconstruction.”

For example, in the same month (October 2006) that the US forces lost a record number of soldiers in Iraq, and the Iraqi citizens lost many more, Halliburton announced that its third quarter revenue had risen by 19 percent to $5.8 billion. This prompted Dave Lesar, the company’s chairman, president and CEO, to declare, "This was an exceptional quarter for Halliburton.”

Jeff Tilley, an analyst who does research for Halliburton, likewise pointed out, "Iraq was better than expected. . . . Overall, there is nothing really to question or be skeptical about. I think the results are very good."

This led many critics to point out scornfully that when around the same time Vice President Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that "if you look at the overall situation [in Iraq] they're doing remarkably well," he must have been talking about Halliburton.[6]

The service and “rebuilding” contractors are frequently called “reconstruction rackets” not only because they obtain generous and often no-bid contracts from their policy-making accomplices, but also because they habitually shirk on their contracts and skimp on what they promise to do. For example, an investigative on-the-ground report from Iraq, sponsored by the Institute for Southern Studies and titled “New Investigation Reveals Reconstruction Racket,” showed that despite “billions of dollars spent, key pieces of Iraq's infrastructure—power plants, telephone exchanges, and sewage and sanitation systems—have either not been repaired, or have been fixed so poorly that they don't function.”

The report, carried out by Pratap Chatterjee and Herbert Docena and published in the Institutes’ Publication Southern Exposure, further revealed that the giant Pentagon contractor Bechtel “has been given tens of millions to repair Iraq's schools. Yet many haven't been touched, and several schools that Bechtel claims to have repaired are in shambles. One 'repaired' school was overflowing with unflushed sewage.”

The report also showed that out of a $2.2 billion “reconstruction” contract with Halliburton, the company spent only 10 percent on “community needs—the rest being spent on servicing U.S. troops and rebuilding oil pipelines. Halliburton has also spent over $40 million in the unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction.”[7]

The spoils of war and devastation in Iraq have been so attractive that an an extremely large number of war profiteers have set up shop in that country in order to participate in the booty: “There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield,” reported The Washington Post in its 5 December 2006 issue.

The report, prepared by Renae Merle, further points out, “In addition to about 140,000 U.S. troops, Iraq is now filled with a hodgepodge of contractors. DynCorp International has about 1,500 employees in Iraq, including about 700 helping train the police force. Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in the country, most of them providing private security. . . . MPRI, a unit of L-3 Communications, has about 500 employees working on 12 contracts, including providing mentors to the Iraqi Defense Ministry for strategic planning, budgeting and establishing its public affairs office. Titan, another L-3 division, has 6,500 linguists in the country.”[8]

The fact that powerful beneficiaries of war dividends flourish in an atmosphere of war and international convulsion should not come as a surprise to anyone. What is surprising is that, in the context of the recent US wars of choice, these beneficiaries have also acquired the power of promoting wars, often by manufacturing “external threats to our national interest.” In other words, profit-driven beneficiaries of war have also evolved as war makers, or contributors to war making.[9]

The following is a sample of such unsavory business–political relationships, as reported by Walter F. Roche and Ken Silverstein in a 14 July 2004 Los Angeles Times article, titled “Advocates of War Now Profit from Iraq’s Reconstruction:”

• Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey is a prominent example of the phenomenon, mixing his business interests with what he contends are the country's strategic interests.

• Neil Livingstone, a former Senate aide who has served as a Pentagon and State Department advisor and issued repeated public calls for Hussein's overthrow. He heads a Washington-based firm, GlobalOptions, Inc. that provides contacts and consulting services to companies doing business in Iraq.

• Randy Scheunemann, a former Rumsfeld advisor who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 authorizing $98 million in U.S. aid to Iraqi exile groups. He was the founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Now he's helping former Soviet Bloc states win business there.

• Margaret Bartel, who managed federal money channeled to Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, including funds for its prewar intelligence program on Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. She now heads a Washington-area consulting firm helping would-be investors find Iraqi partners.

• K. Riva Levinson, a Washington lobbyist and public relations specialist who received federal funds to drum up prewar support for the Iraqi National Congress. She has close ties to Bartel and now helps companies open doors in Iraq, in part through her contacts with the Iraqi National Congress.

• Joe M. Allbaugh, who managed President Bush's 2000 campaign for the White House and later headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Edward Rogers Jr., an aide to the first President Bush, recently helped set up New Bridge Strategies and Diligence, LLC to promote business in postwar Iraq.[10]

There are strong indications that these dubious relationships represent more than simple cases of sporadic or unrelated instances of some unscruplulous or rogue elements. Evidence shows that contracts for the “reconstruction” of Iraq were drawn long before the invasion and deconstruction of that country had started. In a fascinating report for The Nation magazine, titled “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein describes such long-projected “rebuilding” schemes as follows:

“Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate ‘post-conflict’ plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries ‘at the same time,’ each lasting ‘five to seven years.’”[11]

Here we get a glimpse of the real reasons or forces behind the Bush administration’s preemptive wars. As Klein puts it, “a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction.” Klein also documents how (through Pascual’s office) contractors drew “reconstruction” plans in close collaboration with various government agencies and how, at times, contracts were actually pre-approved and paper work completed long before an actual military strike:

“In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual's office keeps ‘high risk’ countries on a ‘watch list’ and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to ‘mobilize and deploy quickly’ after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks—some, Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, will have ‘pre-completed’ contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could ‘cut off three to six months in your response time.’”

No business model or entrepreneurial paradigm can adequately capture the nature of this kind of scheming and profiteering. Not even illicit businesses based on rent-seeking, corruption or theft can sufficiently describe the kind of nefarious business interests that lurk behind the Bush administration’s preemptive wars. Only a calculated imperial or colonial kind of exploitation, albeit a new form of colonialism or imperialism, can capture the essence of the war profiteering associated with the recent US wars of aggression. As Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher put it, “We used to have vulgar colonialism. Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it 'reconstruction.'"[12]

Classical colonial or imperial powers roamed on the periphery of the capitalist center, “discovered” new territories, and drained them off of their riches and resources. Today there are no new places in our planet to be “discovered.” But there are many vulnerable sovereign countries whose governments can be overthrown, their infrastructures smashed to the ground, and fortunes made as a result (of both destruction and “reconstruction). And herein lies the genius of a parasitically efficient market mechanism, as well as a major driving force behind the Bush administration’s unprovoked unilateral wars of choice.

Not only does the new form of imperial or colonial aggression, driven largely by the powerful interests that are vested in the armaments industries and other war-based businesses, bring calamity to the vanquished, but it is also detrimental and burdensome to the victor, namely, the imperium and its citizens. Contrary to the external military operations of past empires, which usually brought benefits not only to the imperial ruling classes but also (through “trickle-down” effects) to their citizens, U.S. military expeditions and operations of late are not justifiable even on the grounds of national economic gains.

Indeed, escalating US military expansions and aggressions have become ever more wasteful and cost-inefficient as they are hollowing out the public treasury, undermining social spending, and accumulating national debt. Viewed in this light, the new form of imperialism can perhaps be called “parasitic” imperialism.

War profiteering is, of course, not new; it has always existed in the course of the history of warfare. What makes war profiteering in the context of the recent US wars of choice unique and extremely dangerous to world peace and stability, however, is the fact that it has become a major driving force behind war and militarism.

This is key to an understanding of why the US ruling elite is reluctant to pull US troops out of Iraq. The reluctance or “difficulty” of leaving Iraq stems not so much from pulling 140,000 troops out of that country as it is from pulling out more than 100,000 contractors. As Josh Mitteldorf of the University of Arizona recently put it, “There are a lot of contractors making a fortune and we don’t want that money tap turned off, even though it is borrowed money, which our children and grandchildren will have to repay.”[13]

It follows that US troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq as long as antiwar voices are not raised beyond the premises and parameters of the official narrative or justification of the war: terrorism, democracy, civil war, stability, human rights, and the like. Antiwar forces need to extricate themselves from the largely diversionary and constraining debate over these secondary issues, and raise public consciousness of the scandalous economic interests that drive the war.

It is crucially important that public attention is shifted away from the confining official narrative of the war, parroted by the corporate media and political pundits, to the economic crimes that have been committed because of this war, both in Iraq and here in the United States. It is time to make a moral case for restoring Iraqi oil and other assets to the Iraqis. It is also time to make a moral case against the war profiteers’ plundering of our treasury, or tax dollars. To paraphrase the late General Smedley D. Butler, most wars could easily be ended—they might not even be started—if profits are taken out of them.[14]


Ismael Hossein-zadeh is a professor of economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of the newly published book, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism His Web page is http://www.cbpa.drake.edu/hossein-zadeh

NOTES:

1. Renae Merle, “Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq,” The Washington Post (December 5, 2006), .

2. The Center for Public Integrity, “Report Finds $362 Billion in No-Bid Contracts at the Pentagon” (September 29, 2004).

3. Bill Rigby, “Defense stocks may jump higher with big profits,” Reuter (April 12, 2006), .

4. The Center for Public Integrity, “Outsourcing the Pentagon” (September 29, 2004), .

5. Esther Schrader, “Companies Capitalize on War on Terror,” Los Angeles Times (14 April 2002), .

6. Steve Young, “What Is Bad for America Is Good for Halliburton . . . Just Ask the Vice President,” OpEdNews.com (23 October 2006), .

7. “War Profiteering,” by Source Watch (a project of the Center for Media & Democracy), .

8. Renae Merle, “Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq,” Washington Post (December 5, 2006), .

9. William D. Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? (New York: Nation Books, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Ismael Hossein-zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York & London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006).

10. “War Profiteering,” by Source Watch (a project of the Center for Media & Democracy), .

11. Naomi Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” The Nation (May 2, 2005), .

12. As quoted in Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

13. Josh Mitteldorf, “Why we’re not getting out of Iraq,” Op Ed News (December 8, 2006), .

14. Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1935 [2003]).