The River

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Creating a market

At bottom, the War on Terror is nothing more than a scheme to keep the military industrial complex from decline.

The seminal document Rebuilding America's Defenses, a product of the Project for the New American Century , begins like this:


The Project for the New American
Century was established in the spring of
1997. From its inception, the Project has
been concerned with the decline in the
strength of America’s defenses, and in the
problems this would create for the exercise
of American leadership around the globe
and, ultimately, for the preservation of
peace.

Our concerns were reinforced by the
two congressionally-mandated defense
studies that appeared soon thereafter: the
Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review
(May 1997) and the report of the National
Defense Panel (December 1997). Both
studies assumed that U.S. defense budgets
would remain flat or continue to shrink. As a result, the defense plans and recommendations outlined in the two reports were fashioned with such budget constraints in mind.


more

[my emphasis]


What better way to remove constraints than to engineer a new and endless war? If profits are up, it's double plus good.

And profits are up:

Bush Budget Delivers the Bacon

By Robert Scheer

President Bush’s outrageous military budget has nothing do with fighting terrorism but everything to do with pumping up the profits of the administration’s generous political donors in the defense industry. So, the question is: Will the Democrats have the guts to stop this betrayal of the public trust?

Ever since some lunatics, mostly citizens of our longtime ally Saudi Arabia, used $3 knives to hijack four planes on the same morning, President Bush has exploited our nation’s trauma as an opportunity to throw trillions of dollars at the military-industrial complex to build weaponry for a Cold War that no longer exists.

That is the subtext of the more than $700-billion defense appropriation requested by Bush in his budget, released Monday. Sure, it includes $141.7 billion explicitly dedicated to fighting “the global war on terror”—but that much-abused phrase falsely encompasses the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or the perpetrator, al-Qaida. In fact, that amount rises to $235.1 billion when the additional supplemental funds to cover Iraq for the remainder of this budget year are added in.


Some of the commentors correct Mr. Scheer on his reflexive use of the ridiculous "Arabs with box cutters" conspiracy theory.

Comments:
If you run a grocery store, the shelves have to be stocked. But even some products are too ugly to put on the shelf:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/070207/us/politics_pentagon_amphibious_dc

It's $22 million, and sometimes, it floats!
 
extraordinary comment, Rose Colored Glasses. Thank you for your efforts in exposing this beast that feeds off the people and threatens the world.

Marc, when your business is based on destruction, waste and degradation, fubar projects don't hinder success, they contribute to it.
 
As they say in Afghanistan:

"Even Al-Qaeda started out good."
 
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