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3 SPEAKING
FREELY Riches keep the US in
Iraq By Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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contributing.
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 ISG and the new US Congress
purport to inject some "realism" into 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 the fact
that by now almost all of the factions of the
ruling circles, including the White House and the
neo-conservative warmongers, 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. 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 giant
manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin,
Northrop Grumman and Boeing, but also a complex
maze of more than 100,000 service contractors and
subcontractors 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 "premature"
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
prospects of controlling Iraq's politics and
economics. Powerful beneficiaries of war
dividends, who are often indistinguishable from
the policymakers 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 will focus here on the role of
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%, from nearly US$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,
1% of the biggest contractors won 80% of all US
defense contracting dollars. The top 10 received
38% 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 on Wall Street: "Shares of US 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
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
taxpayers' money is based on its increasing
practice of outsourcing many traditionally
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% 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 as food and sanitation
services or building maintenance. More important,
they
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