War machine
Zarrar Khuhro
Published October 11, 2021 - Updated about 4 hours ago
“I SPENT 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and 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. … In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
So wrote Smedley Butler who, at the time of his death in 1940, was the most decorated Marine in US history and a veteran of various US ‘interventions’ who came to realise that America’s wars were waged not to defend national, but corporate interests.
After World War II, those interests expanded to include propping up a massive and growing armaments industry, leading president Eisenhower to deliver his 1961 ‘military-industrial complex’ speech in which he warned of the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry … [t]he total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [of which] is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government … in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military industrial complex”.
Today we see the full and frightening fruition of Eisenhower’s prophecy, where the military-industrial complex has drastically increased its size, strength and hold on the American body politic. Today, not only is the US arms industry the biggest in the world, nearly half of the top 100 defence companies in the world are American and, in 2018, American companies alone were responsible for 57 per cent of worldwide arms sales, amounting to some $227 billion. This provides a huge boost to the American economy, which in turns increases the political influence of the defence sector in the US and thus feeds Washington’s need to go to war on a regular basis, creating a vicious cycle of conflict.
More:
https://www.dawn.com/news/1651270/war-machine?preview
Also posted in Editorials and other articles:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016303871
