Published on Thursday, February 9, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Is U.S. Military Dominance of the World a Good Idea?
by Peter Phillips
The leadership class in the US is now dominated by a neo-conservative group of some 200 people who have the shared goal of asserting US military power worldwide. This Global Dominance Group, in cooperation with major military contractors, has become a powerful force in military unilateralism and US political processes.
A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US, which sets policy and determines national political priorities. C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book on the power elite, documented how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US that comprised corporate, military, and government elites in a centralized power structure working in unison through "higher circles" of contact and agreement.
Neo-conservatives promoting the US Military control of the world are now in dominant policy positions within these higher circles of the US. Adbusters magazine summed up neo-conservatism as: "The belief that Democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public pumped on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression. Such nationalism requires an external threat and if one cannot be found it must be manufactured."
In 1992, during Bush the First's administration, Dick Cheney supported Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz in producing the "Defense Planning Guidance" report, which advocated US military dominance around the globe in a "new order." The report called for the United States to grow in military superiority and to prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge us on the world stage.
At the end of Clinton's administration, global dominance advocates founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Among the PNAC founders were eight people affiliated with the number-one defense contractor Lockheed-Martin, and seven others associated with the number-three defense contractor Northrop Grumman. Of the twenty-five founders of PNAC twelve were later appointed to high level positions in the George W. Bush administration.
In September 2000, PNAC produced a 76-page report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. The report, similar to the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance report, called for the protection of the American Homeland, the ability to wage simultaneous theater wars, perform global constabulary roles, and the control of space and cyberspace. It claimed that the 1990s were a decade of defense neglect and that the US must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership as the world's superpower. The report also recognized that: "the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event such as a new Pearl Harbor." The events of September 11, 2001 presented exactly the catastrophe that the authors of Rebuilding America's Defenses theorized were needed to accelerate a global dominance agenda. The resulting permanent war on terror has led to massive government defense spending, the invasions of two countries, and the threatening of three others, and the rapid acceleration of the neo-conservative plans for military control of the world.
The US now spends as much for defense as the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon's budget for buying new weapons rose from $61 billion in 2001 to over $80 billion in 2004. Lockheed Martin's sales rose by over 30% at the same time, with tens of billions of dollars on the books for future purchases. From 2000 to 2004, Lockheed Martin's stock value rose 300%. Northrup-Grumann saw similar growth with DoD contracts rising from $3.2 billion in 2001 to $11.1 billion in 2004. Halliburton, with Dick Cheney as former CEO, had defense contracts totaling $427 million in 2001. By 2003, they had $4.3 billion in defense contracts, of which approximately a third were sole source agreements.
At the beginning of 2006 the Global Dominance Group's agenda is well established within higher circle policy councils and cunningly operationalized inside the US Government. They work hand in hand with defense contractors promoting deployment of US forces in over 700 bases worldwide.
There is an important difference between self-defense from external threats, and the belief in the total military control of the world. When asked, most working people in the US have serious doubts about the moral and practical acceptability of financing world domination.
Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored, a media research organization. A more in-depth review of the global dominance group's agenda and a list of the 200 advocates see: http://www.projectcensored.org/downloads/Global_Dominance_Group.pdf
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Published on Thursday, February 9, 2006 by South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Why 2,245 Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
by Erik Leaver
Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young's arrests at the State of the Union for wearing opposing "protest" T-shirts is the latest illustration of how the Iraq War is the nation's most provocative issue. The attack on free speech for both sides was in fact outrageous. But lost in the T-shirt battle is what really matters: President George W. Bush's failure to tell the nation about the true costs of the war.
Any honest national discussion about the war must begin with the death of Sheehan's son Casey and the other 2,244 soldiers who have died because of this conflict.
The number of soldiers killed boldly written on Sheehan's shirt was a shocking, in-your-face accounting of the State of the Union over the last three years. As horrific as they are, those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg of the human costs of this war. Along those soldiers are 16,584 soldiers wounded in combat, and upwards of 100,000 needing mental health services, just to start with.
Bush didn't mention the human cost of war because in part gross mismanagement by the administration has inflated it. For example, both Bush and members of Congress have pledged to fix problems with body and vehicle armor year after year. But despite promises to fix the situation, the military recently reported that 80 percent of Marines killed by torso wounds could have lived if they had better body armor.
That's hard to swallow, especially when one of the makers of body armor, CEO David H. Brooks of DHB Industries, received $87,500 in compensation for "foregone vacation," almost three times what an Army private makes in an entire year of combat. With complete disregard for rampant war profiteering, Brooks earned $70 million in 2004.
Those veterans who return from Iraq are finding Washington's promises to care for them are violated with impunity. Last year, the Veterans Affairs Department suspended enrollment of 263,257 vets seeking health care. The VA underestimated the number of veterans needing care upon return from Iraq and Afghanistan by 300 percent, so qualified veterans were simply cut from the rolls. Maybe they thought no one would notice.
In addition to the war's human costs, Bush overlooked the financial costs. Three days after the State of the Union address, budget officials announced another $70 billion will be requested. Such a large initiative should have been highlighted for all of the nation. With these funds, the U.S. will spend more than $320 billion in the Iraq War.
As astonishing as this number is, it does not include many of the indirect and long-term costs. Adding in estimates for future Veterans Administration and ongoing health care costs along with the interest on the debt, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes recently estimated the long-term cost of the war at $1.3 trillion.
Instead of calling for a plan to pay for the shared sacrifice needed to cover the war's costs, Bush urged Congress to make his tax cuts permanent. Surely the government could use these funds to offset the looming Social Security crisis he highlighted. Or the sorely needed reconstruction of those cities destroyed by Hurricane Katrina could be accelerated.
The irony of the war's outrageous financial costs is that they hobble the very social and economic programs that keep this country strong. While Iraq staggers under the occupation-spurred violence, the war is exacting a huge toll at home.
The costs of war might be worthwhile if there was indeed a "plan for victory." But squeezing the same lemon again and again isn't producing very good lemonade. The lack of leadership and vision coupled with the tremendous loss of life and staggering economic costs make the Iraq War one of the nation's greatest tragedies.
Ignoring the real human and economic costs of the war, it was easy for Bush to use his State of the Union speech to vow to stay the course. But while Cindy Sheehan and her tell-the-truth shirt from the Capitol were quickly removed from public view, the reality of the war is not so easy to hide.
Erik Leaver is a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the policy outreach director for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project. He is the co-author of "The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops." Online at www.ips-dc.org/iraq/quagmire/
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Published on Monday, February 6, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
An Open Letter to Bubba
by Charlie Anderson
I’ve seen you around. I’ve seen you driving your gas guzzling SUV with the “Support Our Troops” ribbon on the back. I’ve seen you wearing your pro-war/pro-bush t-shirts as you walk right past me in my Iraq Veterans Against the War t-shirt as if I don’t exist. And I’ve seen you at anti-war rallies and meetings where I often speak, as you wave your American flag and call me a traitor. In this country we have freedom of speech. But you owe me and every other veteran of this war the respect of listening to our experience.
Your magnet says “support our troops,” but what have you done for us? Not a penny of the proceeds go to us, instead they go to sweatshops in China. You say that I am not supporting the troops when I say that they should come home. But I am, because I know that there was no threat to our nation from Saddam Hussein, I know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and I know that we were not welcomed in Iraq as liberators. I know that the Iraq war was not worth fighting. I know, because I fought there. You say I’m confused. But what do you know about Iraq? You’ve never been there.
You have the audacity to claim that by not supporting the president, I don’t support the troops. Yet, the president chose to send over 160,000 of us to Iraq unprepared and without a defined mission. We had no body armor, no vehicle armor, and poor supplies of ammunition. Our families spent thousands of dollars that they did not have to supply us, while President Bush did nothing. In fact he didn’t even scold his Offensive Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, when he told our forward deployed troops, “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.” Moreover, the mission was originally about weapons of mass destruction, but there were none. Then it was making Iraq a democracy, but yet the “insurgency” worsens. Now the president has decided that in order to honor those who died for nothing, more must die for nothing.
At present, 2,241 of my brothers and sisters in arms have died. In some way, they may be the lucky ones. Over sixteen thousand others have been wounded in this war, thousands more than planned. The term wounded sounds sterile, bland, and inoffensive. But, in reality, many of them have been so horribly damaged that medical science had to create a new word to describe their wounds: polytrauma. These people would have died in earlier wars, but because of the gallant efforts of brave doctors and medics, they get to live.They get to live with teams of ten or more doctors just trying to get their broken, mangled bodies through another day, as their families look on in horror. They get to live in a physical and emotional hell, not able to recover and not able to voice the pain they feel or the psychological demons they face. All the while suffering with a Veterans Administration under funded by nearly three billion dollars and unable to care for them in the manner they deserve.
So which one of us supports the troops? You, who has never set foot in Iraq and wants to leave my brothers and sisters there until they complete whatever the undefined mission of the week is, or me, the veteran of this war who has seen the carnage of battle, the rampant indifference of my countrymen, and just wants to bring my brothers and sisters home alive and care for them when they get here?
Keep coming to the rallies. Maybe I’ll get through your thick skull eventually. But remember I waved my flag in Baghdad, so you can sit down, shut up, and listen to me.
Charlie Anderson served in Iraq with the Marine Corps’ Second Tank Battalion. He is the Southeast Regional Coordinator of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He can be contacted at iraqvet4peace@yahoo.com
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