CE Week #10: “9-11 good for war merchants
Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate
November 2, 2007
Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden weren’t on the payroll of Lockheed-Martin or some other large defense contractor, then he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9-11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George W. Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.
Lockheed-Martin, the nation’s top weapons manufacturer, reaped a 22 percent increase in profits, while rivals for the defense buck, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, increased profits by 62 percent and 24.7 percent, respectively. Boeing’s profits jumped 61 percent, spiked this quarter by its commercial division. But Boeing’s military division, like the others, has been doing very well indeed since the terrorist attacks.
As Newsweek International put it in August: “Since 9-11 and the U.S.-led wars that followed, shares in American defense companies have outperformed both the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s stock indices by some 40 percent. Prior to the recent cascade of stock prices worldwide, Boeing’s share prices had tripled over the past five years, while Raytheon’s had doubled.”
Not bad for an industry in serious difficulty with the sudden collapse of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, when the first President Bush and his Defense Secretary Dick Cheney were severely cutting the military budget for high-ticket planes and ships designed to fight the no-longer-existent Soviet military. Sure, they had Iraq to kick around, but the elder Bush never thought to turn the then very real aggression of Saddam Hussein into an enormously expensive quagmire. He both defeated Hussein and cut the military budget.
Not so Bush the younger, who exploited the trauma of 9-11 as an occasion to depose the defanged dictator of Iraq and thus provide a “shock and awe” showcase for the arms industry, which continues to benefit obscenely from the failed occupation. The second Iraq war, irrationally conflated with the 9-11 attack that had nothing to do with Hussein, provided the perfect threat package to justify the most outrageous military boondoggle in the nation’s history.
The bin Laden boys only had an arsenal of $3 box knives, but Bush claimed Hussein had WMD. Sadly for the military-industrial complex, Hussein’s army collapsed all too suddenly. But the insurgency, much of it fueled by the Shiites, who were ostensibly on our side, provided the occasion for pretending that we are in a war against a conventionally armed and imposing military enemy.
Of course, we are in nothing of the sort with this so called “war on terror,” a propaganda farce that draws resources away from serious efforts to counter terrorism to reward the corporations that profit from high-tech weaponry that has little if anything to do with the problem at hand.
As Columbia University professor Richard K. Betts points out in Foreign Affairs magazine: “With rare exceptions, the war against terrorists cannot be fought with army tank battalions, air force wings or naval fleets – the large conventional forces that drive the defense budget. The main challenge is not killing the terrorists but finding them, and the capabilities most applicable to this task are intelligence and special operations forces. … It does not require half-a-trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces.”
That half a trillion only covers the Pentagon budget for expenses beyond the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or the Department of Homeland Security. Those last three items total more than $240 billion in Bush’s 2008 budget requests. Add to that the $50 billion spent on intelligence agencies and an equal amount of State Department-directed efforts, and you can understand how we manage to spend more fighting a gang of mujahedeen terrorists, once our “freedom fighters” in that earlier Afghanistan war against the Soviets, than we did at the height of the Cold War.
“The Pentagon currently absorbs more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget,” writes Lawrence J. Korb, “surpassing the heights reached when I was President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense. … And much like the 1980s, we are spending billions of dollars on weapons systems designed to fight the Soviet superpower.”
Thanks to bin Laden and Bush’s exploitation of “war on terror” hysteria, the taxpayers have been hoodwinked into paying for a sophisticated military arsenal to fight a Soviet enemy that no longer exists. The Institute for Policy Studies calculated last year that the top 34 CEOs of the defense industry have earned a combined billion dollars since 9-11. They should give bin Laden his cut.
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I understand that people feel that we have been trying to fight a war on terror that does not exist. However, even if the war on terror was not as legit as it supposedly was. The defense and technology that are men in service should not be limited. Even if they are going against so called $3.00 knifes. This is because our soldier’s lives don’t have a price tag on them and that no expenses should be sparred in order to protect their lives. This is also the case for American lives. If purchasing military defense technology and weapons is a precaution that the government feels in necessary in order to protect American lives. Then so be it.
As for trying to make it a joke and say that the cooperation’s should thank Bin Laden and give him a cut of the profits which have been made. I feel is crude and that issues such as Bin Laden and what he has done is not a matter to joke about. For because of the actions that he has taken have drastically changed American life for the worse and has also taken so many American lives.
I feel this article brings up a good point. I am not so sure we are spending money on a sophisticated military arsenal to fight the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. But I do believe the money we are spending is not worth it. One other thing I am wondering is why I hear things such as munitions are not up to the quality that they should be for the soldier in Iraq. Why if we are spending so much money do our soldier sometimes use rounds from the Insurgents guns, because they are better than what our soldier are firing. That makes not sense to me. First of all I think this war from now on is a waste. We have our hands tied behind our back so we are not able to accomplish what we want to.
Now I really have to disagree with Mattieu on what he is saying in his response. I feel that we don’t need to be spending this much on the war in Iraq when the spending is not shown by the equipment we are using. Plus we are not getting the result we want, or at least not as quick as we want them. Another thing I really dislike is how much people are benefiting from the war in Iraq, it kind of seems sad to me. My last argument is that I would actually like to see where the money that taxpayers are paying is going, because I really feel it’s not where it could be most beneficial.
I think that mercenary forces in Iraq have been the cause of too much speculation. Privateers in the business of selling firearms (not to mention body armor, light infantry and heavy infantry transport vehicles, artillery, munitions, mortars, building compound used in the building and reenforcement of military structures, and so on and so forth) have been providing a service to the US since its inception. There wouldn’t even be a US-Iraqi conflict if the French hadn’t served our cause against the British some 200 years ago. Mercenaries are responsible for their own equipment, training, and often their own transportation. From a tactical standpoint, as the world’s number one superpower, not taking advantage of a resource like that would be an immeasurable mistake.
Nick, I don’t think they are using insurgent’s ammunition because it is better then what we’re providing them. I think it’s far more likely in many cases that when a soldier runs out during a firefight, he simply takes them from a fallen insurgent nearby, as it didn’t look like he needed them as badly. The American military does have to have an arm tied behind its back with Iraq, which is why it’s great to know people who are willing to sell arms.
It’s ridiculous to say that the US is over prepared for anything when it comes to defense. We’re America, we get to be ridiculously well armed for military conflict. If we aren’t preparing for a war on terrorism, then we should be prepared for the next war coming down the pipe, whenever it’s coming.
I’m not so sure that I agree with the statement that the war on terror doesn’t exist. If it didn’t exist then what are we fighting? The war on terror does exist, it’s just not something that can be won. Terrorism is an idea and an idea is not something that you can defeat. If you were to kill or bring all the head terrorist of any organization to justice you still wouldn’t end terrorism. Someone else who has the same thoughts will just jump in and take over. Anyways back to what Matt was saying. I completely agree with him on his war spending statement. If we are going to have American lives over seas with the responsibility of fighting for our country then back at home we should have the responsibility of equipping them with the best weapons and best defenses that we can. I think that it is terrible when people complain about the money we are spending on the war. They need to have the best so that they can do the best for our country. – Matt Powles