WAR
“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.” Martin Luther King Jr. 1967
The American historian Gore Vidal always pointed to passage of “The National Security Act of 1947” as a great turning point for the American republic. The Act institutionalized the Central Intelligence Agency, created the National Security Council, and assured for the first time in American history a permanent war budget. It overwhelmingly passed with bipartisan support.
Only 13 years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, former “Supreme Allied Commander” of European forces in World War II, warned in his farewell address “against the unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex.” In the sixty years since, the power of the National Security State grew immensely and is rarely discussed, despite its actions leading from one travesty to the next.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran a good and unfortunately far too unique piece about the great profits won from the Security State's latest blunder – Afghanistan. The article is titled, “Who Won in Afghanistan? Private Contractors.” The Journal conservatively claims, “$14 trillion was spent in two decades of war” in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They write,
“One-third to half of that sum went to contractors, with five defense companies― Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co., General Dynamics, Raytheon Technologies Corp. and Northrop Grumann Corp. – taking the lion’s share, $2.1 trillion, for weapons, supplies and other services, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, a group of scholars, legal experts and others that aims to draw attention to what it calls the hidden impact of America’s military.”
It has to be noted, American's premier financial paper uses a number of “one-third to half.” Let's see, that would be a difference of around 20% of $14 trillion, equaling $2.8 trillion. Good enough for financial journalism these days.
The Journal continues,
“The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, created to monitor the almost $150 billion in spending on rebuilding the country, catalogued in hundreds of reports waste and, at times, fraud. A survey the office released in early 2021 found that, of the $7.8 billion in projects its inspectors examined, only $1.2 billion, or 15%, was spent as expected on new roads, hospitals, bridges, and factories. At least $2.4 billion, the report found, was spent on military planes, police offices, farming programs and other development projects that were abandoned, destroyed or used for other purposes.”
The Inspector General, (did we get that title from the Gogol satire?), John Sopko, states, “It’s so easy with a broad brush to say that all contractors are crooks or war profiteers. The fact that some of them made a lot of money—that’s the capitalist system.” Yes indeed, it is from Gogol.
With Afghanistan no longer spouting money, the National Security State has to pump up new enemies, none better than the old Ruskis. In the three decades since the self-dismantling of the Soviet Union, the National Security State's policy toward the Russians has been horrendous, not good for the Russians, the Europeans, or the US, but very, very profitable for a few. That's the capitalist system, they say.
With the National Security State, you can easily find the great bipartisanship seemingly lost and endlessly pined for by the American political class. The 50/50 partisan split Senate recently voted 88 in favor for the 2022 trillion dollar Pentagon budget.
Machiavelli wrote, “If the conduct of the Roman republic is considered carefully, it will be evident that two things were the cause of the republic's dissolution: one was the prolongation of military commands.” Some future historian will note at this point in the American republic’s history, the National Security State was in the saddle, unimpeded, for 75 years.
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