31/8/05:US CORPORATE GREED MANIFEST IRAQ WAR(GLW/FWD)




GREENLEFT WEEKLY AUSTRALIA, 31-AUG-2005
www.greenleft.org.au

IRAQ: CORPORATE GREED DRIVES WAR AND OCCUPATION

Rohan Pearce

"War, what is it good for?", asked Edwin Starr in his 1970 hit single
"War". The answer he gave was "absolutely nothin'!", a sentiment no
doubt shared by most people. But for the owners of the euphemistically
named "defence" industry, war - with all its attendant bloodshed and
human suffering - is an opportunity to make megabucks. The invasion
and occupation of Iraq has not proven an exception.

The lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction made by US President
George Bush and the neoconservatives who are a driving force in his
administration may have died an ugly public death, but the real
reasons for the invasion of Iraq still remain obscured in the
warmongers' flowery speeches. For example, in an August 20 radio
address, Bush said: "We're fighting the terrorists in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and around the world, striking them in foreign lands before they
can attack us here at home. And we're spreading the hope of freedom
across the broader Middle East. By advancing the cause of liberty in a
troubled region, we are bringing security to our own citizens and
laying the foundations of peace for our children and grandchildren."

The reality is, of course, that Bush's "war on terror" has nothing to
do with fighting terrorism or spreading the "hope of freedom" (much
less actually spreading freedom).

"War is merely the continuation of policy by other means", said the
Prussian 19th century general Karl von Clausewitz. In the 20th and
21st centuries this has translated to First World governments using
their armed forces to protect the investments of their country's
capitalists in Third World countries, and to defend the "right" of
their country's corporate elite to exploit the raw materials, markets
and labour of the poor countries. The "global war on terror",
charmingly abbreviated as "the GWOT" by the Pentagon, is no different.

>From the beginning of the GWOT, Iraq was in the White House's firing
line by virtue of its abundant oil resources, which potentially spell
a dollar bonanza for US energy corporations, and the strategic role
that a pro-US regime in Baghdad could play in cementing Washington's
domination of the oil-rich Middle East.

At a White House meeting the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US
defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued that the US should use the
terrorist attacks to justify a war against Iraq, despite there being
no connection between 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein's regime.

Present at the meeting, along with Bush and then secretary of state
Colin Powell, was Richard Clarke, the US National Security Council's
counter-terrorism adviser at the time. In his 2004 book Against All
Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, Clarke wrote: "At first I was
incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al
Qaeda. I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and
[then US deputy secretary of defence Paul] Wolfowitz were going to try
to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda
about Iraq."

According to Clarke, Powell argued that Afghanistan had to be the
first target of the "war on terror" because "public opinion has to be
prepared before a move against Iraq is possible".

It had long been the view of the neocons that "regime change" in Iraq
would help usher in a new era of unrestrained US global power in the
post-Soviet era. In January 1998, a letter from the infamous
neoconservative think-tank Project for a New American Century to then
US president Bill Clinton urged "the removal of Saddam Hussein's
regime from power". Almost as an aside the letter also noted that Iraq
possessed a "significant portion of the world's supply of oil".

The letter's signatories included Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and a range of
other neocons who later found jobs in Bush junior's administration,
including Richard Armitage, Robert Zoellick and Zalmay Khalilzad (who
is now US ambassador to Iraq). So when the neocons took over in
Washington after the 2000 presidential election, it was no surprise
that "taking out" Saddam Hussein's regime was put on the White House's
agenda.

According to the US government's Energy Information Administration,
Iraq's proven oil reserves amount to 115 billion barrels and there is
a strong possibility of substantially more oil in unexplored areas. In
addition, the country has natural gas reserves of at least 3.12
trillion cubic metres. For US oil corporations this represented a
massive potential windfall if Saddam Hussein was ousted.

British investigative journalist Greg Palast claimed in March this
year that he had uncovered evidence proving that plans for Iraq's oil
had already begun to be drawn up shortly after Bush took office in
2001. According to Palast, whose claims were aired on BBC's Newsnight
program on March 17, there were disagreements between the neocons and
oil company executives about the most desirable way to carve up Iraq's
natural resources - the neocons favoured hell-for-leather
privatisation while the oil executives favoured the creation of a new
Iraqi state-run oil company that would give "favourable" treatment to
US corporations. Either way, it would be US corporations that reaped
the oil profits from regime change.

That the Pentagon chiefs would sacrifice the lives of tens of
thousands of Iraqis and of thousands of US soldiers for the
bottom-lines of the corporate rich is nothing new. As US Major-General
Smedley Butler pointed out, war is a racket. In his 1935 book of that
title, Butler explained: "I spent 33 years and four months in active
military service as a member of this country's most agile military
force, the Marine Corps... And during that period, I spent most of my
time being a high-class muscleman for big business, for Wall Street
and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for
capitalism...

"I helped make Mexico ... safe for American oil interests in 1914. I
helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank
boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen
Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record
of racketeering is long."

Even the crisis-stricken occupation of Iraq, challenged by a
predominantly indigenous resistance movement, is an opportunity for
corporate gluttony "crisatunity", as Homer Simpson might put it). The
Pentagon continues to rack up huge bills in its struggle to terrorise
Iraqi's into submission to Washington's rule and the bulk of this
money finds its way back into the bank accounts of US corporations -
"corporate welfare" on a mammoth scale.

Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary at the US commerce
department, argued in an August 20 New York Times op-ed that "if the
American military presence in the [Middle East] lasts another five
years, the total outlay for the war could stretch to more than $1.3
trillion...

"The cost goes well beyond the more than $250 billion already spent on
military operations and reconstruction. Basic running costs of the
current conflicts are $6 billion a month - a figure that reflects the
Pentagon's unprecedented reliance on expensive private contractors."

In September 2004, the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity
released a study showing that half of the Pentagon's annual budgeted
expenditure went directly to private corporations. In the six years
leading up to the study, the proportion remained unchanged. But, as
the CPI study points out, as the US "defence" budget has grown ever
more massive thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, "so have the
dollars going to contractors".

This massive transfer of public wealth to private corporations through
war spending is far from unique to the US. In Australia, year after
year, the federal and state governments tear public education and
health funding to shreds. But the Australian military consistently
gets a budget bonanza - in 2005 Australia's "defence" budget was
A$17.5 billion. Like the famous graffiti slogan goes, "It will be a
great day when our schools get all the money they need, and the army
has to hold a cake stall to buy a bomber".

But it is in the US that the amount of money wasted on the business of
war reaches a truly obscene pinnacle. According to an April 27 report
released by accountancy group PricewaterhouseCoopers, US military
spending reached US$417.4 billion in 2003 - 47% of total world
military spending. The report noted that "the US defence budget has
increased by 60% in constant US$ over the last ten years".

As Butler's classic anti-war tract argued: "War is a racket. It always
has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable,
surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It
is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the
losses in lives...

"How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of
them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in
a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened
nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many
of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were
wounded or killed in battle?

"Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are
victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly
is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of
blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill."

And the bill, wrote Butler, "renders a horrible accounting. Newly
placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and
homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant
miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." Any
of that sound familiar?

>From Green Left Weekly, August 31, 2005.
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