Tag: military industrial complex

Even as Afghan War Ends, GOP Attempts to Add $25B to Military Budget

Just as the United States completed its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan on Monday after two decades of war and occupation, House Republicans announced plans to push for a $25 billion increase in annual military spending—a proposal that progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups swiftly rejected.

Led by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, the GOP intends to pursue a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) amendment that would add $25 billion to President Joe Biden’s $753 billion topline military spending request for Fiscal Year 2022.

The House Armed Services panel—which is awash in donations from weapons makers and other major industry players—is expected to begin marking up Biden’s request on Wednesday.

“Rogers’ amendment would dole out $15 billion to address a spate of military unfunded priorities that weren’t included in the Pentagon’s budget request,” Politico reported Monday. “It would add $9.8 billion to weapons procurement accounts, including money for four more Navy ships, more planes and helicopters for the Navy, Marine Corps, and National Guard, and upgraded Army combat vehicles.”

Approval of the GOP’s amendment would bring the House version of the NDAA—a sprawling annual defense policy bill that typically passes with overwhelming bipartisan support—into line with the Senate’s. Last month, as Common Dreams reported, the Senate Armed Services Committee agreed to pile $25 billion onto Biden’s proposal, which already calls for an increase over Trump-era Pentagon spending levels.

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Warmongers Keep Raging About The Phrase ‘Ending The Forever Wars’ And We Should Laugh At Them

In the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal influential promoters of western militarism have been absolutely fuming about the popular idea of ending the forever wars, and their tantrums are not even trying to disguise it as something else. They’re literally using that phrase, “ending the forever wars”, and then saying it’s a bad thing.

I mean, what a bizarre hill to die on. War is the very worst thing in the world, and forever is the very worst amount of time they could go on for, yet they’re openly condemning the “doctrine of ending the forever wars”. How warped does your sense of reality have to be to even think this is a view anyone who isn’t paid by defense contractors could possibly be sympathetic to?

Yet they are indeed trying. Citing the chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal as though every single day of the twenty-year occupation has not been far worse, career-long warmongers are trying to spin “ending the forever wars” as a disdainful slogan that everyone should reject.

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“War Is a Racket”: The US War in Afghanistan Validates General Smedley Butler

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” – Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940) in his book “War is a Racket” (1935).

The ending of the 20-year-war in Afghanistan, the longest ever engagement in a single conflict by the United States armed forces, has been variously described as a “catastrophe”, a “disaster” and a “debacle”. Yet this national failure from which parallels have been drawn with the Vietnam War has not had the same ring of misfortune for some.

Indeed, long before the recent scenes of calamity and collapse in Kabul brought home with resounding finality the futility of a supposed nation-building exercise, the profit-motive for the initial US invasion and the preservation of an enduring occupation was an open secret to anyone who bothered to embark on the slightest inquiry.

The gravy train of American defence spending was in full effect, facilitated by the tentacles of what US President Dwight D. Eisenhower prophesied would become the Military Industrial Complex. For the last two decades have witnessed what has been described as a “wealth transfer from US taxpayers to military contractors”.  But the war, apart from confirming Afghanistan’s reputation as the “Graveyard of Empires”, also validates the phrase coined by US Major General Smedley Butler that war is a racket.

The blame game currently being played out in the United States media by the political class risks obscuring one fundamental issue: the centrality of money and the profit motive in the waging of America’s two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.

The invasion of that country had been planned well in advance of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the event which provided the impetus for mounting a military response including the country’s occupation. The United States has long coveted gaining access to the mineral and oil rich Caspian region and Central Asia, and the coming to power of the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban movement was not seen at the time by US policy makers as an impenetrable obstacle.

As the French writers Jean-Charles Briscard and Guillaume Dasquie wrote in their book Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden, which was published in 2002, the American government had been prepared to accept Taliban rule on condition that they agreed to the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia.

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Lawmakers Benefit From Booming Defense Stocks

Since U.S. military actions in Afghanistan were authorized in September 2001, the stocks of the top five defense companies have risen in value by an average of nearly 900%, strongly outperforming the S&P 500 index.

Among those who have benefitted from investments in the stocks are nearly four dozen members of Congress, the people who approve funding for the contracts that make up the bulk of the companies’ revenues.

At least 47 members of Congress and their spouses hold between $2 million and $6.7 million worth of stock in companies that are among the top 100 defense contractors, a Sludge analysis of financial disclosures found. 

The war in Afghanistan has caused an estimated up to 174,000 direct war deaths, according to the Costs of War Project, with economic costs reaching over $2.26 trillion there and in Pakistan. The total cost of post-9/11 wars including Iraq and other operations has surpassed $6.4 trillion through last year.

At least 11 U.S. senators hold up to $1.7 million in defense industry stocks and at least 36 U.S. representatives hold a maximum value of over $5 million. Congress only reports its investments in broad ranges, so it’s not possible to know exactly how much their stocks are worth. Members of Congress have at least 108 investments in 16 major defense contractors, including all of the top 10 companies by defense revenue.

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Ask not what the war cost the US, but who profited from the war

After twenty years and trillions flowing through the Pentagon’s war chest, the real winners were thousands of private military contractors that profited immensely.

The Taliban’s stunning takeover of Afghanistan in the aftermath of a bungling US departure has led many to conclude the war in Afghanistan ended in failure. But it is unlikely to be a view shared by many in the US military.

For them, the twenty-year-long conflict has been a massive success.

When discussing the politics of war, a central premise is often put forward: Cui bono? Who benefits? John Boyd, a former Air Force fighter pilot famously expounded on a theory where there was no contradiction between the military’s stated mission and disregard for combat success:

“People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy,” he said. “They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy. It is ‘Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.’”

And add to it they did.

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Now Would Be A Great Time For George W Bush To Shut The Fuck Up

George W Bush has issued a statement on the situation in Afghanistan, and there are not enough shoes in the world to adequately respond to it.

“Laura and I have been watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness,” the Hague fugitive writes. “Our hearts are heavy for both the Afghan people who have suffered so much and for the Americans and NATO allies who have sacrificed so much.”

Bush tells the US Armed Forces, diplomatic corps, and intelligence community how proud he and his wife are of their “sacrifice” and “courage” and that they “kept America safe” and “made America proud” with their decades-long occupation which accomplished literally nothing besides making horrible people very rich. And, it won’t surprise you to learn, the statement contains exactly zero apologies to anyone for anything.

Can you believe this person? Imagine being George W Bush in the middle of August 2021 and saying to yourself, “I know just what people need: a pep talk on Afghanistan from me, George W Bush!”

I mean, the gall. The absolute gall.

This is after all the same man who ordered the disastrous invasion in the first place under the justification of the plot hole-riddled 9/11 narrative after already having decided to oust the Taliban a month before the towers came down. The same man who rejected the Taliban’s offer to turn over Osama Bin Laden in October 2001 if the US would just show proof that he is guilty and end its bombing campaign. The same man who repeatedly rejected Taliban offers to surrender after the invasion began. The same man who initiated decades of lies about what was happening in Afghanistan in order to justify an occupation maintained for power and profit.

And after all that phony hand-wringing about “the oppressed people of Afghanistan“, the United States is after twenty years of occupation leaving the Afghan people the single most miserable population of any nation on earth. After all that phony hand-wringing about “the Taliban’s war on women“, Afghanistan has remained the worst place in the world to be a woman throughout the entirety of the occupation.

And it is entirely the fault of the US-centralized empire. The Taliban only came to power in the first place because the US backed their predecessors (whom they also actively radicalized) against the Soviet Union and its leftist Afghan allies in the eighties, then Bush invaded and rained explosives from the sky for twenty years, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

After four decades of interventionism and two decades of full-scale occupation following generations of shocking savagery and terrorism being inflicted upon the Afghan people by the British, it is perfectly fair to say that one hundred percent of Afghanistan’s problems today can be blamed entirely on the US and its allies.

So now, as the nation reverts back to Taliban control after a long and sadistic intermission and many Afghans are so fearful that some fell to their deaths desperately clinging to departing US military planes, it would be a fantastic time for George W Bush to shut the fuck up.

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The Propaganda Multiplier

It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.

The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.

A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.

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