WAR IS A RACKET
War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. - Gen. Smedley D. Butler
80 years ago, a true patriot blew the whistle on the dark motivations for war in his classical treatise: War is a Racket. Gen Smedley D. Butler exposed the fallacies trumpeted by the press about how and why wars are fought. Gen Butler reveals that underneath hollow platitudes of patriotism, war is in fact, a business. And as such, patriotism is measured by the bottom line in relation to the high cost of lives. While charges of conspiracy theorist would flood Butler's allegations, he named names with facts and figures. Butler cites: International Nickel, Utah Copper, Central Leather, American Sugar Refining Company and Brown Brothers Harriman as the chief beneficiaries of the “First War to End All Wars.” However, unsurprisingly, the most culpable appears to be the infamous J.P. Morgan Jr of the Banking House of Morgan.
It is a widely known fact that Morgan loaned nearly 2.5 billion dollars to BOTH the Allied and Central Powers during the war. The lion share, of which, went to the British. In the aftermath of the war, the British would owe the U.S. a whopping 4.7 Billion dollars. (61 Billion in today’s money) This spigot of free flowing financing was probably the most significant contributor to Allied victory over the Central Powers. Coincidentally, US intervention would later save these loans made by Morgan to all the warring factions. However, Morgan’s opportunism did not stop at mere financing. Giving a new meaning to the phrase in “disaster there is opportunity”,Morgan would later become the sole purchasing agent for the British where he would make some $20,000,000,000 in purchase orders for the British while pocketing a whopping $400,000,000 in commission for his services. His purchases confirm and exemplify the kind of cronism Gen Butler spoke about since almost all of Morgan’s purchases were from fellow millionaires, colleagues and munitions makers such as Du’pont Chemical, Remington and Winchester Arms. On a side note, these same forces would later ask Butler to be the front man of a coup to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934. (See the Business Coup of 1934 https://www.powerandstrategy.com/single-post/2017/09/09/THE-BUSINESS-COUP-OF-1934)
If Butler had been the sole anomaly in the line of military whistle-blowers, he could have easily been dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. He was not. In the 1970′s, the Late Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, would once again remind the public of Gen. Butler’s ghastly warning. Like Butler, most of Prouty’s information draws not only upon official government records and sources, but on more than 20-yrs of active military service, which culminated in his appointment to Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Col. Prouty pulled back the curtain on American adventurism in the Vietnam War and revealed the windfall made from the our military excursions in Southeast Asia. He projects, and subsequent congressional testimony confirms, that between 220 to 550 billion dollars in military expenditures occurred due to the war.
Prouty cites the example of the development of special helicopters that were used in Indo-China. He alleged that a bank executive from the Bank of Boston approached him sometime in the early 60′s about the feasibility of these aircraft in the Indo-China theater of war. At that time Prouty stated that there was no practical use for the aircraft since there was no active involvement by the U.S. Military in the area at the time. Then all of a sudden, wala! enter the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the U.S. would be in Vietnam by 1965. And with the Vietnam War, came the demand for that particular aircraft. Prouty stated that at the time in 1961, the cost of that helicopter was approximately $250,000 each. He stated that approximately 4,000 of these aircraft were lost in Vietnam. These helicopters were simply left in the Vietnamese jungles. Do the math! That’s 1 billion dollars spent for one brand of aircraft that was never recovered, salvaged or accounted for after the war. It was a good war for the manufacturer: Bell Helicopter.
Then of course, there is Air America, the C.I.A. proprietary company that was active in the 1950′s and 60′s. It is estimated that Air America flew over 10,000,000 military personnel, spies, diplomats and government assets into Indo-China. The profit from these flights eclipsed the profit from any commercial airliner in operation during the Vietnam period. Vietnam had the effect of giving the C.I.A and its allies a virtual monopoly in air transport in Indo-China before and during the Vietnam War years. Although the C.I.A. officially denied any connection between itself and Air America, subsequent congressional investigations into allegations of government complicity in the drug trade in Southeast Asia, have successfully verified the relationship between the C.I.A. and Air America.
But he didn't stop there. Col. Prouty exposed the massive propaganda machine which promoted these military escapades all over the globe on behalf of private corporate interests.
Prouty implied that the Manichean Devil of Communism was the rationale for the cold war. According to him, this boogeyman created a multi-trillion dollar defense industry with clients on both sides of the "Iron Curtain." While both Butler and Prouty reveal the intrigue of past profiteering, another whistle-blower has come forth to confirm this corrupt and decadent state of affairs.
Author John Perkins spelled out the racket in alarming detail in his book Confessions of An Economic Hitman. Perkins corroborates Butler and Prouty's allegations, and states in detail, the extent to which huge trans-national corporations identify and covet natural resources for production, distribution and profit. Perkins and others like him would apparently walk into the capitol offices of third world leaders and make them an “offer that they couldn't refuse.” Perkins as a “gangster for capitalism," stated that the chain of events would go something like this. A new president would come to power. He or someone like him would walk into their offices with a proposal for financial loans, which the president would take under the guise of development. The loans would inevitably go into default either because of the greed of the country's president, or the onerous clauses of the contract. At this point, the institution that made the loans would demand, as collateral, access to the country's raw materials as payment for the debt. So called austerity programs would commence and as a result, the economic infrastructure of the country would collapse. Mass starvation, vagrancy, and social misery would provoke civil unrest.
In this atmosphere, thousands would perish for lack of basic medical treatment that would be routine in any neighborhood clinic in America. But, if the leader refused the loans, the intelligence community would employ assassination as the precursor of a coup; and hand control of the country over to the most corporate friendly, yet brutal, military dictator. Should the leader somehow miraculously survive the assassination and the coup, a pretext for war would be drummed up by the Defense Department, echoed by the press, and the military would be used as an instrument of power to protect the interests of the transnational corporation. If we examine the consequences of the first two wars of the 21st Century, we find the same modus operandi. A 2013 article published by CNN (Contractors reap $135 billion from Iraq war) states that "at least $138 billion dollars has been paid by the U.S. Tax-payer to private contractors that have supplied everything from private security, logistics and reconstruction, to power plants and toilet paper." Chief among these private contractors is KBR, once known as Kellogg Brown and Root. The controversial former subsidiary of Halliburton, which was once run by Former VP-Dick Cheney, was awarded at least $39.5 billion in federal contracts related to the Iraq war over the past 10-yrs. In the Afghan theater, it is estimated that at least 410 billion in arms and military services were sold by 100 of the largest munitions makers in the world. With just 10% of those companies selling over $208 billion of that 410 billion, it is clear that the racket continues.
The Ghost of Gen Smedley Darlington Butler haunts the American psyche with a horrifying prophesy created by a nation sustained on a permanent war economy. Endless military interventions, ever-expanding defense budgets, enormous national debt, erosion of civil liberties, massive government surveillance, domestic police corruption,and the centralization of the American economy into the hands of the few, are the externalities of international police actions in the interests of private corporations. Interventions that escalate ethnic border conflicts into full blown cash cows and massive body counts where nothing is settled; only continued. Gen Butler's ominous whisper reminds us of what we have always suspected in the darkest recesses of our collective imaginations. WAR IS A RACKET!!!! WAR IS A RACKET!!!! WAR IS A RACKET!!!
