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CounterPunch
October
25, 2002
Behind the Drive to War:
Bush's Escalating Military Budget
by ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH
There are clear indications that the Bush administration
is pushing for the invasion of Iraq. Not only does the administration
seem determined to invade Iraq, but it is bent to do so in a
hurry. The plan to attack Iraq would serve as the first instance
of President Bush's new doctrine of "pre-emptive strike"
against countries perceived, or defined, as "threats to
the national interests of the United States." Even if the
administration's rationale for "preemption" and "regime
change" is accepted, the question remains: What is the
rush?
The administration's logic is that speed
is a crucial part of preemption. What the administration is
really trying to preempt, however, is not so much the alleged
imminent threat of Saddam Hussein to U.S. national interests,
as it is the threat of a national debate over the administration's
war plans that might expose some of the dubious, but submerged,
motives behind those plans.
The administration is obviously wary
of the fact that, in the aftermath of the heinous crimes of
9/11 and the subsequent surge of patriotism, its policy of "regime
change" and its drive to war have essentially escaped a
national or a meaningful congressional debate. More than anything
else, the haste to change the Iraqi regime seems to be prompted
by a desire not to lose this "favorable" momentum
of patriotism.
American people are essentially a fair-minded
people. And the administration's case against Saddam Hussein
is weak, notwithstanding his brutality and his criminal record-to
which, incidentally, U.S. foreign policy makers have contributed
significantly.[1] Despite a number of vague allegations, the
administration has failed to produce credible evidence that
would link the Iraqi regime with the September 11 attacks. Nor
has any of Al Qaede's financial sources been traced to Saddam
Hussein. Nor is the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein
poses an imminent threat to U.S. national interests convincing.
In fact, "A recent CIA report indicates that the Iraqis
have been consciously avoiding any actions against the United
States or its facilities abroad, presumably to deny Washington
any excuse to engage in further military strikes against their
country." [2] The administration is understandably wary
of the likelihood that the revelation of these facts during
a meaningful national debate might restrain its drive to war-hence,
its rush to war to preempt such a debate.
But if the fear of a national debate,
and the concern for losing the "propitious" momentum
for war, explain the speed with which the administration is
preparing for war, they do not explain the more fundamental
question of what drives the administration to war in the first
place. Specifically, what are the driving forces behind its
new strategy of "preemption" or, more generally, behind
its "war on terrorism" and its policy of "regime
change"?
Critics have pointed to a number of factors.
One such factor is said to be the President's own political
needs to maintain his 9/11-induced strong status as Commander-in-Chief.
A second contributing factor is the administration's implicit
hope that an even bigger military spending that would result
from the war might help shorten the current economic recession.
An unholy alliance between the militarist hawks in or around
the Bush Administration and the equally hawkish elements of
Zionism, both in Israel and here in the States, is said to be
a third factor behind the administration's drive to war. [3]
Control of the major sources of world oil constitutes a widely
cited fourth factor in the administration's push for war.
While these factors have significant
contributing effects on the administration's propensity to war,
the main engine for the war juggernaut, however, seems to be
supplied by the military-industrial complex-the powerful beneficiaries
of the Pentagon budget, the strong vested interests that derive
dividends from war.
As foreign policy is often a reflection
of domestic policy, the Bush Administration's drive to war abroad
also seems to be largely a reflection of the metaphorical domestic
war over allocation of national resources, or tax dollars. In
the debate over the allocation of the national budget, beneficiaries
of the Pentagon budget have found a very effective strategy-instigation
of international tensions and wars-to usurp the lion's share
of the nation's public revenue. An examination of this relationship
is the main focus of this essay.
The Role of the Military-Industrial Complex
A military force is usually a means to
meet certain ends: to maintain national security or to achieve
territorial, political, and economic gains. Such was also the
case with the U.S. military force before WW II. In the postwar
period, however, military buildup in the United State has acquired
a new dimension. In addition to being a means to achieve political
and economic gains, it has also become an end in itself, a military-bureaucratic-industrial
empire-better known as the military-industrial complex. As such,
the complex has developed a built-in mechanism that constantly
drives it to war, not necessarily to defend national interests,
as its representatives usually claim, but to advance its own
interests, to further strengthen and expand the military-industrial
empire. Indeed, the interests of the empire are better served
by fomenting international tensions and wars-either actual shooting
wars or the specter of war-than promoting peace.
This inherent tendency to war is what
makes this imperial power more dangerous than the imperialist
powers of the past ages. Under the rule of past imperial powers
(whether free-trade imperialism, colonial imperialism, or pre-capitalist
forms of imperialism), the subjugated peoples or nations could
live in peace-imposed peace, to be sure-if they respected the
interests and the needs of those imperial powers and simply
resigned to their political and economic ambitions. Not so with
the U.S. military-industrial empire: The interests of this empire
are nurtured through "war dividends." Peace, imposed
or otherwise, is viewed by the beneficiaries of war dividends
inimical to their interests as it would make justification of
the continuing increase of their share of the national resources,
in the form of the Pentagon budget, difficult.
Of course, tendencies to build bureaucratic
empires have always existed in the ranks of military hierarchies.
By itself, this is not what makes the U.S. military-industrial
complex more dangerous than the military powers of the past.
What makes it more dangerous is the "industrial" part
of the complex. In contrast to the United States' military
industry, arms industries of the past empires were not subject
to capitalist market imperatives. Furthermore, those industries
were often owned and operated by imperial governments, not by
market-driven private corporations. Consequently, as a rule,
arms production was dictated by war requirements, not by market
or profit imperatives, which is often the case with today's
U.S. arms industry.
Thus, private ownership and the market-driven
character of the United States' arms industry have drastically
modified the conventional relationship between the supply of
and demand for arms: It is now often the supply (or profit)
imperatives that drive demand for arms. In other words, imperial
wars and demand for arms are nowadays precipitated more by sales
and/or profit prerequisites than the other way around, as was
the case with imperial powers of the past. President Eisenhower's
warnings near the end of his second term against the potential
dangers of the military-industrial complex seem to have been
prompted largely by this intrinsic tendency of the complex towards
war and militarism.
The fact that the military-industrial
complex benefits from international conflicts explains why it
has almost always reacted negatively to discussions of international
cooperation and detente. Thus, for example, in the late 1940s
and early1950s, the Korean War and the "communist threat"
were used as pretexts by the proponents of military buildup
to overrule those who called for limits on military spending.
Representatives of the military-industrial complex, disproportionately
ensconced in the State Department, succeeded in having President
Truman embark on his famous overhaul of the U.S. foreign policy,
which drastically increased the Pentagon budget and expanded
the military-industrial establishment.
Likewise, in the face of the 1970s' tension-reducing
negotiations with the Soviet Union, representatives of the
military-industrial complex rallied around Cold Warrior think
tanks such as the "Committee on the Present Danger"
and successfully sabotaged those discussions. Instead, once
again, by invoking the red scare of the "evil empire,"
as President Reagan called the Soviet Union, they managed to
reinforce the relatively weakened tensions with the Soviet
Union to such new heights that it came to be known as the Second
Cold War-hence, the early 1980s' dramatic "rearming of
America," as President Reagan put it.
Similarly, when the collapse of the Soviet
system and the subsequent discussions of "peace dividends"
in the United States threatened the interests of the military-industrial
complex, representatives of the complex invented the "threat
of rogue states to our national interests," and successfully
substituted it for the "threat of communism" of the
Cold War era.
This helps explain why the Bush Administration,
under the heavy influence of the Defense Department, viewed
the 9/11 tragedy as an opportunity for remilitarization. The
monstrous attacks of 9/11 were treated not as crimes-as they
actually were-but as war on America. Once it was thus established
that the United States was "at war," military buildup
followed logically.
What is more, President Bush and his
circle of war-mongering advisors have made their declared war
on terrorism open-ended and permanent. It is open-ended because
the Bush Administration seems to have no difficulty finding
"terrorism" by definition; that is, "by deciding
unilaterally what actions around the world constitute terrorism,"
or by arbitrarily classifying certain countries as "supporters
of terrorism," as Bill Christison, retired CIA advisor,
put it. [4]
Not only has the "war on terrorism"
thus been made open-ended, but it is also said to be fought
best on a preemptive, first-strike basis. "As a matter
of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such
emerging threats before they are fully formed," wrote President
Bush in the introduction to his new foreign policy document,
"The National Security Strategy of the United States."
This strategy of preemption, also called the Bush doctrine,
formally replaces the half-century old Truman doctrine of containment
and deterrence. The drive to make the "war on terrorism"
permanent is clearly reflected in the official pronouncements
of going beyond the Taliban, Afghanistan, and even Iraq:
While still wrangling over how to overthrow
Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration is already looking
for other targets. President Bush has called for the ouster
of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. Now some in the administration-and
allies at D.C. think tanks-are eyeing Iran and even Saudi Arabia.
As one senior British official put it: "Everyone wants
to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." [5]
Justification of war has never been made
so simple: it does not seem to require more than the mere fancy
of the beneficiaries of "war dividends."
Once the 9/11 brutalities were thus exploited
as opportunities for war and militarism, heightened military
spending followed logically. Although prior to 9/11 President
Bush had promised big increases in the Pentagon budget, he had
also stated that those increases must accompany a reconfiguration
of the military apparatus, especially of the procurement's shopping
list. At the heart of the projected reconfiguration was the
plan to prioritize military spending in favor of high-tech,
"futuristic" weaponry. But the 9/11 attacks averted
the contested prioritization of military spending. It saved
the policy makers the pain of re-slicing the pie of the pentagon
budget by drastically augmenting the size of the pie. Or, as
James Cypher put it, "It allowed the Pentagon to have its
cake and eat it too-continuing major Cold War-era weapons systems
and funding the cyber-age 'Revolution in Military Affairs'
(RMA)." To be sure, the high-tech weapons systems will still
enjoy preferential spending, but the post-9/11 Pentagon budget
provided enough funding to keep everyone happy, both the "old
military" and the "new military." [6]
In March 2001, President Bush submitted
his 2002 budget that showed an increase of $14 billion in military
spending over Clinton's 2001 budget of $291 billion. At the
same time, the President indicated that the United States would
be moving beyond the Cold War model (of building a huge arsenal
of tanks, planes, ships, and missiles to contain the Soviet
Union) and into the "Revolution in Military Affairs"
(of giving priority to high-tech warfare such as smart bombs,
night-vision instrument, satellites, robot observation planes,
highly mobile light armor, and so on). As this threatened the
powerful interests that had been deeply vested in the Cold War
model since WW II, tensions flared up within the military-industrial
establishment. The New York Times characterized the skirmishes
as a battle "as intense and intemperate as any in recent
memory."
The flow of additional $47 billion, in
the form of "emergency response fund," into the coffers
of the Pentagon in the aftermath of September 11 ended those
clashes as it filled all the deep pockets of the beneficiaries
of the Pentagon budget. In all, military spending for the fiscal
year 2002 has risen by nearly $54 billion over the initial
2001 level of $291 billion, an increase of almost 19% percent.
For the fiscal year 2003 it will amount to $376 billion, the
highest item in the Federal budget (of approximately $2,130
billion). [7] (Officially, military spending is the second highest
item in the Federal budget after Social Security payments. But
Social Security is a self-financing trust fund. So, in reality,
military spending is the highest budget item.)
According to Steven Kosiak, an analyst
at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the total
2003 defense budget will be 11% higher than the average military
expenditure during the Cold War. By 2007, under the Bush plan,
defense spending will be 20% higher than average Cold War levels.
And according to Professor Paul Kennedy of Yale University,
the U.S. now spends more each year than the next nine largest
national defense budgets combined. Indeed, the United States
is now responsible for about 40 percent of the world's military
spending. [8]
Manufacturers of fighter planes will
receive an astonishing $400 billion in new multi-year contracts.
Lockheed Martin will get $225 billion over 12 years to build
nearly 3,000 Joint Strike Fighter planes for the Air Force,
Marines, and Navy. According to Business Week, Lockheed will
also be able to earn $175 billion from sales in foreign markets.
Almost 50% of the world arms market is currently controlled
by the United States, with an average annual military sales
of approximately $17 billion in foreign markets in recent years.
"That figure will be on the rise," points out James
Cypher of the California State University at Fresno, "as
new weapons are delivered to Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt." Cypher further
points out:
Looking ahead, the RMA's [Revolution
in Military Affairs'] fantastic weaponry-and its enormous costs-are
only just beginning to emerge. Northrup Gruman, General Atomics,
and Boeing are speeding robot airplanes into production. Other
contractors are developing thermal imaging sensors to "see"
targets through night, distance, fog, and even rock formations.
The Navy is promoting a new destroyer-class warship, the DD-21,
loaded with cruise missiles and guns capable of hitting targets
100 miles inland. Known as the "stealth bomber for the
ocean," the DD-21 is estimated to cost $24 billion. Cost
overruns of over 300% are common, however, so there is no telling
what taxpayers will ultimately pay. [9]
These numbers clearly indicate that the
war industry has handsomely benefited from the 9/11 destruction.
The fact that the United States' war industry flourishes on
war and destruction has also been reflected in the stock prices
of the military industry in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The attacks led to the collapse and temporary shut down of
the Wall Street stock market. When it reopened several days
later, the few companies showing increased value were the giant
military contractors Alliant Tech Systems, Northrop Gruman,
Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. As the US military's biggest supplier,
Lockheed Martin's share value rose by a staggering 30 percent.
While these giant manufacturers of warfare
products are the obvious beneficiaries of the "war on terrorism,"
there is also a whole host of the less visible Pentagon contractors
that are just as handsomely benefiting from the expanded military
spending. These are the somewhat clandestine, privately-contracted
companies that operate on the fringes of the U.S. foreign policy
by training foreign "security forces," or by "fighting
terrorism." "With little public knowledge, or debate,
the government has been dispatching private companies-most of
them with tight links to the Pentagon and staffed by retired
armed forces personnel-to provide military and police training
to America's foreign allies." [10] Thus, as Esther Schrader
of the Los Angeles Times points out in her fine investigative
piece, "Companies Capitalize on War on Terror," "When
the Pentagon talks about training the new Afghan National Army,
it does not mean with its own soldiers.. Instead, the Defense
Department is drawing up plans to use its commandos to jump-start
the Afghan force, then hire private military contractors to
finish the job." [11
Referring to the fierce competition among
these private military training companies to win Pentagon contracts,
Pete Singer, an Olin Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program
at the Brookings Institution in Washington, points out, "This
is big business among these companies. They are furiously bidding
on involvement in Afghanistan and the war on terrorism. The
minute the Pentagon started to use the phrase 'a program to
train and equip the Afghan army,' buzzers went off." The
Bush Administration's open-ended "war on terrorism"
promises to be a boon for these companies. "The war on
terrorism is the full employment act for these guys," pointed
out D. B. Des Roches, spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Security
Cooperation Agency. [12]
In many cases, these private military
firms 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 the former Army Chief of Staff
Carl Vuono and seven other retired generals. It counts 20 former
senior military officers on its board of directors. Army Lt.
Gen. Harry E. Soyster, an executive at MPRI, boasts: "We
have got more generals per square foot here than in the Pentagon."
Other major military firms include Vinnell, BDM International
Inc., Armor Holdings Inc., DynCorp of Reston, Va., and SAIC.
These and a number of the lesser known military training contractors
"operate today in more than 40 countries, often under contract
to the U.S. government." [13]
The fortunes of these military training
contractors, like those of the manufacturers of the military
hardware, have skyrocketed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks:
"Since Sept. 11 and the Pentagon's launch of the war on
terrorism, the stock prices of the publicly traded contractors
have soared." For example, "The per share price of
stocks in L3 Communications, which owns MPRI, has more than
doubled." [14]
Sadly, though, the flourishing of the
fortunes of these "modern-day mercenary companies,"
as Esther Schrader of the Los Angeles Times puts it, like that
of the giant arms manufacturing companies, comes about at the
expense of world peace and stability. They also come about at
the expense of U.S. taxpayers and their curtailed, unmet, or
foregone social needs such as health and education.
What makes the militarist tendencies
of the beneficiaries of "war dividends" especially
dangerous is that, in the debate over military spending, representatives
of these beneficiaries have almost always managed to camouflage
their nefarious interests behind the national interests and,
thereby, to outmaneuver the advocates of curtailment of the
Pentagon budget. During the Cold War era that was not a difficult
act to perform as the explanation-the "communist threat"-seemed
to conveniently lie at hand. Justification of increased military
spending in the post-Cold War period has prompted the military-industrial
interests to be very creative in concocting "new sources
of danger to U.S. interests." These "new sources of
threat" are said to stem from the "unpredictable,
unreliable regional powers of the Third World," from the
so-called "rogue states," and more recently from "world
terrorism" and "Islamic fundamentalism."
A good example of how the military-industrial
complex has consistently camouflaged its interests behind national
interests is the case of the Middle East oil. Heavy U.S. military
presence in the Middle East is often explained by the rich oil
reserves there. Without discounting the importance of sources
of energy, it could be argued that U.S. policy makers for the
region have deliberately mystified and misrepresented the role
of oil. For one thing, evidence shows that for every dollar's
worth of oil imported from the Persian Gulf region the Pentagon
takes five dollars out of the Federal budget to "secure"
the flow of that oil! For another, why would the flow of oil
be in jeopardy if the U.S. militarists put an end to their mischievous
policies in the region? No matter how crucial oil is to the
world economy, the fact remains that it is, after all, a commodity.
And as such, international trade in oil is as important to its
importers as it is to its exporters. There is absolutely no
reason that in a world free of nefarious imperial interests,
and the concomitant international mischief-making, the flow
of oil could not be guaranteed by international trade conventions
and commercial treaties. [15]
Another factor that makes beneficiaries
of war dividends dangerous to world peace is their ominous ability,
especially under the current administration, to foment international
convulsions and wars in order to justify the continuous hemorrhaging
of the Pentagon budget. That ability comes largely from the
extensive ties and considerable influence that these beneficiaries
have within the Defense Department, the National Security Council,
the State Department, the White House, and the key Congressional
Committees. This explains, to a large extent, how or why the
Bush administration, largely under the influence of the Defense
Department and/or the military-industrial establishment, has
been able to manipulate the 9/11 tragedy into an open-ended
"war on terrorism," a doctrine of "preemption,"
and a policy of "regime change."
It is this ominously built-in drive to
war that makes the Bush administration "a threat to world
peace," as Nelson Mandela has recently put it. In fact,
some concerned citizens, obviously moved by the ferocity of
the administration's military posturing, have begun making
comparisons between the administration's relentless drive to
war and Germany's drive to war in 1939: "I cannot stop
thinking of 1939, when everyone could see the war coming and
no one, it seemed, could do anything to stop it. . . . Today,
the dogs of war are barking not in Europe but in the District
of Columbia, and again people are looking on helplessly as the
tragedy unfolds." [16]
Is there anything that can be done to
restrain the Bush administration's war machine? Yes, and no.
Yes, if the promising flickers of anti-war sentiments that have
slowly begun to stir here and there among the American people
become widespread-in time-to foil the poisonous propaganda
of pseudo-patriotism that is relentlessly circulated by the
champions of militarism. And, no, if this does not happen, or
does not happen soon enough. The rest of the world seems to
be helpless in the face of the overwhelming power of the U.S.
war machine. As Scott Laderman of the Minnesota Daily recently
put it, "As persons in possession of democratic rights,
whether we allow the Bush administration's threat to world peace
to materialize is up to us." [17]
Ismael Hossein-zadeh teaches economics at Drake University. He can
be reached at: ismael.zadeh@drake.edu.
This article originally appeared in Payvand.
Notes
1. See, for example, (a) Mike Toner,
"U.S. likely sent Iraq toxic bugs," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(October 2, 2002). Web version: http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/news/1002/02terbugs.html
(b) Matt Kelley, "Records
Show U.S. Sent Germs to Iraq," Associated Press (October
1, 2002).
2. Stephen Zunes, "The
Case Against War," The Nation
3. See, for example,
(a) Richard H. Curtis, "Israel's
Lobby Tries to Widen Net Against Terrorism," The Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs (December 2001);
(b) Gilad Atzmon, "The
Zionist Lobby and the American Foreign Policy," in:
Counterpunch, August 22, 2002.
(c) Brian Whitaker, "US.
Think Thanks Give Lessons in Foreign Policy," Guardian,
August 19, 2002;
(d) Brian Whitaker, "Playing
Skittles with Saddam," Guardian, Spetember 3, 2002;
4. "The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the United States,"
Counterpunch, May 9, 2002.
5. Roy Gutman and John Barry, "Beyond
Baghdad: Expanding Target List-Washington looks at overthrowing
the Islamic and Arab world," Newsweek, August 19, 2002
6. James Cypher, "The Iron Triangle:
The New Military Buildup," Dollars and Sense, Jnauary/February
2002, p. 17.
7. Budget
of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2003 (Summary
Tables);
8. As cited by Julian Borger, Guardian,
February 6, 2002.
9. Cypher, Ibid., pp. 18-19.
10. Ken Silverstein, "Privatizing
War, How Affairs of State Are Outsourced to Corporations Beyond
Public Control," The Nation, July 28-August 4, 1997.
11. Esther Schrader,
Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2002:
12. as quoted by Schrader, Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. On this issue see, for example, Chalmers
Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), pp. 87-88
16. Robert Higgs, "Helplessly,
We Await the Catastrophe Our Rulers Are Creating,"
17. "U.S.
Represents Threat to World Peace,"
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October 14,
2002
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Ireland:
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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