On December 30, 2006 Saddam Hussein was executed at an Iraqi-American military base, ironically called Camp Justice. On January 1, 2007, South Korean diplomat Ban Ki-Moon became the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations.
On January 4, 2007, Nancy Pelosi became the first woman speaker of the US House of Representatives. The January 6-12, 2007 edition of The Economist cover read: “A chance for a safer world.” Twenty-three months later, Barack Obama won the presidential race in the US. It seems that everyone was looking forward to a safer world.
Time, however, has shown that a safer world is not the priority of politicians. Armies are expensive to maintain and conducting war is how you do it. The military-industrial complex, as US President Dwight D Eisenhower referred to it, refers to the relationship between a country’s military and the defence industry that supplies it with weapons and equipment.
He warned about the growing influence of the military-industrial complex and its potential to exert undue influence on a country’s policy.
Modern war involves a close relationship between a government, its military and the defence industry. The military’s demand for weapons and technology drives the development and production of these goods by private defence contractors, who in turn, lobby for increased military spending and influence government policies to support their interests.
This is where billions of dollars are spent on researching and conducting future wars, and not the lives of civilians or a safer world. The main actors in these war games are defence contractors, research institutions and government agencies responsible for defence procurement.
Later that year, on November 14, 2007, the Seattle Times wrote an opinion piece titled “Blackwater: bulging biceps fuelled by ideological purity.” Its opening sentence read: “Blackwater, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political base: America’s war machine and a muscular form of fundamentalist Christianity.”
If you were around during the Iraq War, you would remember names like Halliburton and Blackwater. The article states that “military contractors Halliburton and Blackwater were the brainchild of then vice-president Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld”.
One of Cheney’s goals was “to privatise as much military work as possible, ostensibly to make it more efficient”. He also commissioned a study by Halliburton, which became America’s largest military contractor. Cheney was later hired as Halliburton’s CEO.
While world leaders talk of an “expansionist Russia”, a “nucleararmed Iran”, “Islamic insurgence”, an “unstable horn of Africa”, and, its favourite topic, the “unstable Middle East” and “unpredictable Arab world”, the evidence all points to the long tentacles of military contractors, secret “muscular Western fundamentalist Christianity” and privatised armies that are embedded in relatively peaceful societies, all stirring conflict that will lead to war.
Co-opted Western media companies lead with headlines that painted non-Western religion and ethnicity as the provocateurs of wars.
While civilians who take to the streets or resistance movements that attack installations are portrayed as wars having ethnic or religious origins; the real wars have been planned long ago by the military-industrial complex.
Billions of dollars are spent annually in the West on military and intelligence innovations, while thousands of embedded operatives are sent to potential or existing conflict zones in the world.
These embedded operatives ensure that religious or ethnic oppression remains a feature in potential war zones and secondly, that resistance to oppression keeps escalating to a potential civil or national conflict. This is how big defence contractors and private armies make their money and satisfy the voters of their paymasters.
There is no money in peace. There is no money in a safer world. Masquerading as agents of peace and justice, the Western military-industrial complex has managed to convince its watching voter base of its intentions to be a force for global peace, while its owners and shareholders are watching bulging war-funded balance sheets.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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