December
26, 2023
The
$1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to
the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it
impoverishes and endangers America and the world.
US ambassador to the United Nations Linda
Thomas-Greenfield abstains during a vote to approve a resolution that
"demands" all sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict allow the "safe and
unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale" at UN
headquarters in New York on December 22, 2023.
On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly
irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally
isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians,
voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by
153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and
9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.
In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy
objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US
occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s
President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow
him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission
overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia
in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine
in 2022.
Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one
following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US
foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake
Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.
What gives?
The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign
policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about
the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions
and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US
foreign policy has been hacked by big money.
As a result, the American people are losing big. The
failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or
around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the
coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by
Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered
abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to
property and nature in the war zones.
The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays
in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if
we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other
intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the
Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s
military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related
budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain,
squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary
arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.
Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain
the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military
outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and
the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the
world.
To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s
federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest
bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health
Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and
Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House,
Pentagon and CIA.
Each division uses public power for private gain through
insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying
outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy
division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an
astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the
highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the
world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into
very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy
translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.
The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive
and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA,
the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House
and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin,
General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand
key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little
role.
The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800
US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military
contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more
wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has
been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more
and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and
to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.
In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of
military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military
and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and
CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role,
in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape
lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and
forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947,
typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations,
insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt
wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see
Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).
In addition to business interests, there are of course
ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The
ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial
interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about
ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and
long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their
usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the
military-industrial complex.
There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing
business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the
American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of
course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street,
oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the
machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth.
America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high.
Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.
The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George
Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy
from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does
the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season.
Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda,
Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US
propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a
smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is
ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.
The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks
that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign
governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic
Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War,
brought to you by the major military contractors.
The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy
operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the
American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by
drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the
war. The public erupted in opposition.
From the 1970s onward the government has been far more
clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for
hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit
soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that
government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military
budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would
be triggered if it were tax-funded.
It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to
fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil
the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan,
Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the
frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal
(D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because
it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow
not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died
by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.
This system is underpinned by the complete subordination
of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the
over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch.
The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional
oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed
Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and
the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the
rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both
parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to
provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and
families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying
firms.
The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only
by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the
art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state
and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy,
not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments
that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will
vastly top that in 2024.
When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby,
Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will
tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in
Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and
Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the
Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The
purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering.
They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests
over those of the American people.
It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul
a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying
the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.
This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the
disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and
diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the
public interest.
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