1-13-04

A Hundred Thousand Corpses

This war is wrong. Don't get your hackles up. I'm not selling anything. I'm not going to ask you to sign anything. I don't belong to a group. I'm not prosyletizing. I'm just an individual. And I'm telling you this war is wrong.

War solves nothing. We know this. We can prove it mathematically. All it does is destroy cultures and kill people and break things and no matter who wins, both parties drain thier economies to support it. It inhibits our evolution by draining productive resources. The only reason to have a military is because of rogue states led by tyrants who are too intellectually and spiritually immature to realize or care that war is bad in the long term, people like Saddam Hussein.

Every nation has soldiers, guys whose sole purpose is to kill. They don't think of it that way, of course. They get pumped full of all kinds of lies and conceits, told that they're "serving thier country" or "protecting the homeland" or whatever. But they're basically hired killers. Hired to protect thier country from the other hired killers, the ones from foreign lands. All of the hired killers think they are protecting someone from all the other hired killers. The way they see it, they are noble warriors sacrificing themselves to protect the feeble masses from adversaries they didn't know they had. But all of the soldiers on all of planet earth kind of cancel each other out. If each of our individual cultures didn't have aggressive violent groups of men (it's always men, women don't do this kind of shit), the rest of us who work for a living and do productive things like produce food, build houses, study and learn, teach, and grow and mature, wouldn't have to sacrifice a massive portion of our budget to hiring *our* thugs to go kill *thier* thugs, whoever *they* are.

Teachers make jack-shit, but the defense contractors are reaping billions. This is a sick culture and we know it. It seems to me all it would take to accelerate our evolution as a species is for all the nations of the world to find a way to de-militarize at the same time. That means all of us who don't enjoy fighting and killing, but instead enjoy growing things, have to figure out what to do with our obsolete warriors. I know it's idealistic and unworkable, but let's not be so cynical as to say it's not possible. It's just a choice.

But when it comes to the American military-complex, there is a much more complicated dimension, that of neo-liberal imperialism. In our system, the excuse of protecting our homeland from thugs, or promoting freedom or world order or whatever they call it, hides the underbelly of the war industry. There is a huge vested interest in this nation which profits massivley from war, which is a state funded enterprise. So what you get is resources flowing out of the productive centers of society and into the corporations who are selected by the Pentagon to run the war machine. And these corporations are laregly staffed by ex-military and ex-government types, as well as international investment bankers.

Let's also be honest about the fact the the military-industrial complex leans to the right. The left in this country is a ruse, a distraction allowed to persist in the interest of promoting the perception of legitimacy in a fake two party system. Most of the CEO's and investors who run the complex are political conservatives. And many of them, chillingly, are now investing the "vote machine industry". Lockheed-Martin and others are major stockholders in vote machine corporations.

Now, in a functioning democracy, the idea that whoever makes the voting machines has anything to do with politics would be considered a massive conflict of interest. Take Diebold, for instance. Its CEO not only donated to the Republican party, but in a memo, promised to secure Ohio's votes for the president. That's outrageous. It's also probably just a coincidence that the state election officials who presided over the critical states in the last two elections: Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 and Ken Blackwell in Ohio in 2004 also doubled as Bush's state campaign managers. Again, in a functioning democracy, this we be considered an unacceptable conflict of interest. But back to the military complex.

Now, America has always had a large and disciplined military, but during and after WWII, a new system was born. Ironically, the war helped pull the nation out of devastating depression by mobilizing and ordering production more centrally.

By the end of the war, with the nuclear cat out of the bag, America was the only great power unscathed, in fact, strengthened by the war. And by virtue of its relative moral authority was granted amazing latitude in ordering the world system, even hosting the United Nations, which made spying on diplomats much easier. It was agreed during the war, probably at the Bretton Woods conference that America would assume the role of the world's banker and military proxy, on behalf of the world capitalism system, laying the groundwork for the showdown with the Soviet Union. The capitalist nations agreed to participate in global organisaztions such as the IMF and World Bank, both of which are 51% owned by the American Treasury, whose money is printed by the Federal Reserve-- a private banking cartel whose policy is coordinated with other privately owned central banks by the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.

I'm not making a value judgement here. I would rather live in a world run by America than a world run by the USSR, but what emerged was an American system built around war. The Pentagon was for years the largest office building in America and the Defense Department the largest single employer of Americans. Defense lobbyists greased palms on behalf of thier clients, jockeying for position to feed at the public trough. Wall Street rallied. From 1945 to 1968, America enjoyed the greatest wave of wealth ever seen. Even after 1968, though the per capita wealth has dropped steadily, America remains the richest country in the world.

Another thing that developed after the war was the CIA, a tax-funded government agency whose budget and activities are a secret. Now, because wealth is officially within the "national interest", it is easy to rationalize using the CIA to perform industrial and commercial espionage, and to arm terrorist movements in the name of anti-communism whenever it threatened America's coporate investments. It also engages in "disinformation" and has notably placed agents in commercial television networks. Again, I'm not making value judgements here, just trying to elucidate the scope of things.

Large portions of the defense budget since WWII have been allocated to research and development. One of my favorite Defense agencies is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Now, remember, the Defense Department doesn't actually perform the work-- it is parceled out to private corporations. For instance, when DARPA needed software to constantly monitor all traceable activities of all Amercians and a database system that could "mine" the data, it hired the CEO of a company called Axiomatics. The CEO's name was John Poindexter. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he was convicted of conspiracy and several other crimes during the Iran/Contra investigation, but was pardoned by George Bush the elder. After Poindexter was hired, he chose as the company to develop the software-- Axiomatics, naturally. The revolving door between Pentagon contractors and elite beurocrats is well documented. Dick Cheney, James Baker, James Woolsely and others are well known for it. Most of the Defense Department's brass is invested in "defense" companies (weapons makers).

But the main purpose of all of this isn't so much to defend America-- America is probably the most difficult nation in the world to invade. Let's not forget that the Defense Department sells weapons selectively and strategically, and sometimes even secretly to other nations, a practice which gives the benefit of knowing exactly what weapons systems your allies are using and what thier weaknesses are. American corporations don't make weapons just for ourselves, they are sold to every other nation on earth. Every war fought with American weapons made a profit for an American corporation. America has the best weapons and the best intelligence in the world, which it lords over the other counrtries, manipulating events around the globe. America has embassies in every nation which admittedly house CIA spies. America has a military presence in 143 nations. I guess the point I'm making here is that it's too late to stop what America has become. Our own inertia alone can carry us now.

The war in Iraq is wrong. Wrong on every count. If you don't believe me, I want you to visualize a hundred thousand corpses, piled high and rotting. That's how many civilians have been killed. A hundred thousand corpses. Whatever reason you may think justifies this war, it is wrong. There were no WMD's and Iraq was never a military threat. We know that. I admit that Saddam Hussein was a murderous totalitarian dictator, but we must also face the responsiblity for creating and sustaining him. Again, I'm not scapegoating or pointing fingers here, just trying to reckon the shape of things.

Hussein took power by assisinating rivals on a list drawn up by the CIA in order to purge the Communists, a policy favored by oil corporations eager to get concessions from one of the central OPEC nations. The Reagan Administration armed him to fight Iran. Most of the chemical weapons he used were supplied with the full knowledge and silence of the defense establishment, like Donald Rumsfeld, who was dispatched in 1983 to "normalize" relations. The American military strategy in the region had always been to arm all of the countries in the region in such a way as to balance thier powers, cancel each other out, and keep the oil flowing. It's the old imperialist stratagem, eloquently summed up by Zbigniew Brzezinski as "keeping the barbarians from coming together". America has a long history of fomenting coups amd installing strongmen to run a country on behalf of American investments, and hoping that strongman didn't become a tyrant.

So although this war is wrong, it is equally inevitable. The dominoes were set in place generations ago. Would the middle east be of such paramount military significance if it didn't sit on most of the world's recoverable oil reserves? Could the industrialist countries prosper without cheap oil? Would those draconian societies have been able to stagnate for generations if they hadn't been locked in place by a corrupt ruling elite?

Immorality is a blight on the human landscape and its consequences are too enormous to calculate. In this way, we all pay for the sins of our fathers. May god have mercy on homo sapiens.