July 27, 2004
Not Copyrighted
Please post especially where prohibited.

WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS

Invest Your Sons & Daughters

A Thumbnail History of America's Dark Side And Suggestions To Save The Planet

By Tom Cahill
(tcahill@mcn.org)

In ancient times, war was good news for those who crafted bows,
arrows, spears, armor, catapults, chariots, even those who supplied horses
and forage for the noble beasts as well as the victuals for the warriors.
And let's not forget the flag-makers, song-writers, camp-followers and the
generals who usually prospered. Businessmen, the career military, and
politicians especially have always been quick and eager to exploit the
peasants' fear of an "enemy." If there was no threat from abroad, one
could always be easily created, then demonized, packaged and sold along
with lots of colorful banners and catchy songs.

Clever, rich old men have forever sent undereducated, poor young
me to kill or be killed for God, Country and Gold but not necessarily in
that order of importance. Medals have always been a cheap "thank you, son"
for services rendered, lives, eyes or limbs lost.

In the American Revolution, while the Minutemen were freezing and
starving at Morristown and Valley Forge, among those who got wealthy from
that decade-long war were Robert Morris, William Duer, Elias Derby, and
William Bingham. "The merchant has no country," warned Thomas Jefferson in
response. During the US Civil War, the country's bloodiest conflict to
date in which a half million Americans on both sides were slaughtered,
those who avoided military service and opted to make money from the carnage
were John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carneigie, J. Pierpont Morgan, Jay Gould,
Philip Armour and Marshall Field. These are more familiar names, now
known to American history as the "robber barons."

'Remember the Maine'

The media of the time was almost always complicit, never, ever
asking the "hard questions" that would make newspapers appear unpatriotic,
as critics charged in the roll-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The
term "yellow journalism," meaning heavily slanted propaganda, was coined
shortly before the Spanish-American War. William Randolph Hearst rushed to
judgment about the sinking of the US battleship Maine in Cuba in 1898 and
stirred up such high emotions in his nationwide chain of newspapers, that
the US ended up colonizing the Spanish possessions of Cuba and the
Philippines and even grabbed Hawaii which was an independent monarchy.
Many inquiries and many decades later, after an investigation led by
Admiral Hyman Rickover, the US Navy finally admitted the Maine, fueled by
coal, was blown apart by an accidental explosion of coal dust and not by
the Spanish Navy. Oops! Was an apology ever made to Spain? I don't
think so.

'I'm a Yankee Doodle Dan-dy, Yankee Doodle Do Or Die...'

Working class, American "doughboys" returning from France after WW
I became incensed when they learned of the mountains of wealth made by war
profiteers safely at home while they were in the muddy, bloody trenches of
Flanders. They demanded wealth be drafted as well as men for future wars.
So united and loud became their voice of outrage that conservative
businessmen and their servants in government organized , among other
groups, the American Legion to paint the "radicals " as unAmerican. This
led to the "Red Scare" of the early 1920s which was a pogrom against the
left. Because of the "Palmer Raids" during this time, a young J. Edgar
Hoover rose to prominence with his fledgling Federal Bureau of
Investigation that confirmed earlier fears that the FBI would become a
secret political police force which is what it is to this day.

Early in the Great Depression, the politicians--always generous
with patriotic platitudes--reneged on a promised bonus for service in WW I.
So in May 1932, a handful of unemployed, blue collar vets led by Walter
W. Walters encamped in Washington, DC. When their "Bonus Expeditionary
Forces" swelled to almost 20,000 men, wives and children--many homeless
and starving--Pres. Herbert Hoover sicked General Douglas MacArthur, his
aide-d-camp, Capt. Dwight Eisenhower, and a force of regulars including
armored vehicles on the Bonus Army at Anacostia Flats, July 28. Maj.
George Patton led a cavalry charge with swords. Many of the ragtag
protesters were injured and a baby was killed in the rout.

The opening scene of In Pursuit of Honor, dramatically depicts the
refusal of some calvarymen to draw sabers on their former brothers-in-arms.
Their punishment is what the rest of the film is about. Don Johnson plays
Medal of Honor winner, M/Sgt. Jack Libby in the 1995 movie made for TV and
now on video.

Oil, The Blood of War

Teapot Dome, Wyoming, was an oil reserve set aside by Pres. William
Taft's Administration in 1912 for exclusive use of the US Navy in wartime.
A decade later it was discovered private oil companies had been illegally
obtaining (stealing) this oil and selling it on the public market. The
resulting scandal, despite endangering national security, turned out to be
a tempest in a   ahhhh   teapot. But from this time, oil became
recognized as an integral part of the so-called "defense industry."

Shortly before WW II, Congress became concerned about how bankers,
munitions makers, oil moguls and others seemed to encourage wars.
Republican Sen. Gerald Nye of South Dakota organized an investigating
committee that resulted in the Neutrality Acts of 1935,1936 and 1937. But
this was a time fascism was looming in Europe and Japan and conservatives
tend to be soft on their cousins on the far right. Had communism been the
threat, attitudes may have been different, fear may have been exploited ,
and the US may have gone to war with the Soviets at that time.
Antisemitism made Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, and
Adolph Hitler kindred spirits. For years, Hitler kept a large portrait of
Ford in his office.   The Fuhrer gave Ford a medal. Subsidiaries of Ford,
General Motors and other US manufacturers helped rearm Germany in the
1930s.

During the Hitler years from 1933 to America's entry into the war
in December 1941, despite the Neutrality Acts and military "lend-lease" to
Britain, US investment in Germany increased by almost fifty percent while
declining almost everywhere else in Europe, according to Kevin Phillips in
American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in
the House of Bush (2004).   Prescott Bush, grandfather of Pres. George W.
Bush, as managing partner of the investment bank, Brown Brothers Harriman,
didn't stop doing business with the Nazis till well into 1942 when Pres.
Franklin Roosevelt forced a halt. To polish his tarnished image, Bush got
himself appointed chairman of the United Service Organization (USO) and
helped raise $33 million of other people's money that year for
entertaining servicemen and women.

'Remember Pearl Harbor'

Neo-cons (or are they neo-fascists) today falsely charge the left
with appeasement in the 1930s. Of the overwhelming majority of Americans
who were against involvement in another foreign war, only a minuscule
portion were pacifists. The majority were conservative isolationists who
saw direct or indirect profit from rearming Germany and Japan. By 1940,
when Britain stood alone against the Nazi onslaught, Pres. Roosevelt and UK
Prime Minister Winston Churchill conspired to bring America into the war.
Because of the huge population of German-American isolationists and racism
against Asians, FDR and Churchill saw Japan as easier to provoke into
making a first strike against America so necessary to unite the country. If
Japan went to war, so would Germany and Italy, such was the provision of
their Tripartite Pact of Sept. 27, 1940.

A number of provocations were instituted by the Roosevelt
Administration against Japan, most hurtful of which was an oil embargo,
according to Robert Stinnett in Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and
Pearl Harbor (2001). US intelligence had already broken Japanese military
and diplomatic codes. Pearl Harbor was the most likely target of a
Japanese attack because Midway was too insignificant and the West Coast of
the US was too suicidal.

For many decades, the battleship was considered the "Queen of the
Fleet." But by 1941, the aircraft carrier was the new sovereign. At Pearl
Harbor in December of that year, obsolescent dreadnauts were lined up along
"battleship row" like ducks in a shooting gallery while new aircraft
carriers were kept safely out to sea.

Meanwhile German forces were at the very gates of Moscow. At the
western end of the Moscow subway line, Wehrmacht soldiers could see the
spires of St. Basel's Cathedral in the Kremlin. Except for the Battle of
Britain in the summer before, there was no more critical time in WW II.
Thus the aerial bombing of Pearl Harbor was no "sneak attack" as
was splashed across headlines of newspapers throughout America. US
intelligence knew when and where the Japanese would strike America. Top
officials in the Roosevelt Administration as well as the British power
elite were also naturally fully apprised. On Dec. 10, 1941, three days
after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the US as
Americans across the country were still singing, "Let's re-mem-ber Pearl
Har-bor, as we march to vic-to-ry..."

Fast forward to 2004. A growing number of Americans, who believe
conspiracy is synonymous with politics, are convinced the Bush
Administration knew a "terrorist" attack from the air was imminent in
September 2001. Ignored were warnings from US as well as many foreign
intelligence services. On the fateful day, the Federal Aviation
Administration's air traffic control in New York and Washington, DC was
sabotaged. US Air Force fighter interceptors were grounded . And the
set-up was so Iraq would be blamed.

The rationale for this ploy of the neo-con conspirators was/is
that to defend the United States of America from its jealous and hate
filled enemies, it needed to unite America to hurry and finish the job of
dominating the world. And the most effective and profitable way to do
this is through control of the oil of the Mideast in general and in
particular that of Iraq with its massive reserve. After all, Humvees
don't run on air and California Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger drives a
different one each day of the week. Sundays, it's the blue Hummer;
Mondays, the yellow one; Tuesdays, the olive drab one to play soldier
with...

To paraphrase Adolph Hitler--today oil, tomorrow the world.

Trading With The Enemy In WW II

Other US financiers and corporations not only did business with
Hitler before but also during WW II via neutral countries, according to
Trading With The Enemy by Charles Higham (1983). The Rockefellers'
Standard Oil Company, for instance, not only helped fuel the Luftwaffe and
the U-boat wolf packs through neutral Spain, but through their Chase Bank
of New York, they helped launder $378 million in gold looted from
Nazi-occupied countries and from teeth of Holocaust victims.
When it came to making money, the Rockefellers remained neutral in
other conflicts too. During the Korean War, they traded with Eastern Bloc
countries, according to Higham. During a later war, savvy American GIs
would ask green replacements, "What's the safest vehicle to hitch a ride on
in Vietnam?" The punchline was, "An ESSO oil truck--the Viet Cong loose
their aim when they see one," according to Bob Brewin and Sidney Shaw in
Vietnam On Trial (1987).

Ford, IT&T, and RCA were among other US corporations that
influenced the US Army Air Force not to bomb certain targets in
Nazi-occupied countries. Someone even warned the Germans about one raid on
Schweinfurt in which sixty American bombers with six hundred men aboard
were shot down in flames.

Instead of receiving prison sentences for war profiteering in WW
II, top executives of the Bechtel Group escaped the scrutiny of the
Truman Committee and actually received awards because of their connections
in Washington., according to Laton McCartney in Friends In High Places
(1988).

Responding to charges of fraud and waste in the war industry even
before US entry into WW II, then US Sen. Harry S. Truman (D-Missouri)
organized a committee that saved so much money and made him so popular, he
was nominated Pres. Roosevelt's running mate in the 1944 election. Upon
Roosevelt's death five months later, Truman became the most powerful man in
the world. After the war, when Secretary of State George Marshall
suggested a plan to rebuild Europe, Truman reminded Congress of the money
his committee saved during the war which would be ample to pay for the
Marshall Plan.

More than in any other previous time, WW II blurred the distinction
between business and national security. Thus was birthed the war machine
that later came to be known as the "military-industrial complex," a
Frankenstein monster that under the Administration of Pres. George W. Bush
is clearly trying to devour the world as Hitler failed.

'Cold' War Spooks

As previously mentioned, the Rockefellers did business with Eastern
Bloc countries and North Vietnam during the Cold War. Though virulently
anti-communist, Bechtel was never loath to do business with the Soviets
either, having built for them pipelines, refineries, fertilizer plants, and
a world trade center in Moscow, according to Laton McCartney. For years,
Bechtel worked closely with the CIA providing intelligence, a business
front for agents, and even arms to rebels friendly to the USA. The Reagan
Administration included many former Bechtel execs such as Secretary of
State George Schultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Director
of the CIA John McCone.

"The interests of the intelligence community, organized crime and
megabuck corporations overlap in concentric selfserving circles," wrote
Warren Hinckle and William Turner in The Fish is Red (1981).
The Central Intelligence Agency is one of a dozen or so
organizations in the vast US intelligence community and it, like the FBI,
is only mid-sized. Biggest of the lot may be US Air Force Intelligence of
which I was a member in Germany in the late 50s. The National Security
Agency may be second largest. As of two decades ago, NSA had acres
(plural) of computers spying on the world. With the same space allotment
and years of electronic miniaturization, NSA's computers can't miss much
today. If Osama bin Laden is still alive, he must be on another planet or
the US knows exactly where he is. Some large corporations have their own
intelligence-gathering departments employing ex and retired government
spooks who often work along with the rest of the alphabet soup of
government agencies, bureaus, and departments that make up the intelligence
industry. This should give you an idea of how huge and expensive is the
effort to spy on "subversives" at home and abroad.

Oversight committees of both Houses of Congress have traditionally
rubber-stamped the work of the intelligence community. Rumors of
downsizing spy organizations have been just that--scuttlebutt. What
politician would dare buck the intelligence system? If not an "accident,"
the representative would have his or her dirty laundry publicly aired in
the corporate media which is always eager to make a buck and is just as
intimidated of the cloak and dagger as anyone.

But it's the CIA that's the headline-grabber because of it's
history of assassinations, illicit drug trafficking, gun-running, and
other "black operations." Originally mandated by the Truman Administration
to only gather intelligence and only abroad, the ink wasn't yet dry on its
charter when in 1947 it took over from French Intelligence a drug pipe line
from Indochina to Marseille, according to Dr. Alfred McCoy in his book The
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug
Trade (1972). The conduit known as the "French Connection" was in exchange
for helping subdue communists in France. The drug trading eventually got
out of hand which was one of the causes for US involvement in the West's
decades-long war on Vietnam. One of the CIA's "blowbacks" (unexpected
negative effect) resulted in as many as one third of American GIs in
Vietnam being hooked on heroin. The CIA would peddle the dope to corrupt
South Vietnamese officials who in turn would have children sell it to US
servicemen outside their bases.

Today tens of thousands of US veterans of the fighting in Vietnam
are homeless. Aging, sick and dying, they wander the streets of American
cities while others languish in prisons for drug abuse and violence.
More than a decade ago, it was estimated more Vietnam vets had committed
suicide than died in combat in Southeast Asia.

CIA's War On The Third World

In his book, In Search of Enemies (1978), John Stockwell estimated
the CIA was responsible for the deaths of perhaps six million people of the
Third World from the time of the Agency's inception in 1947 to the time he
wrote his expose. This he calls the CIA's "Third World War." Stockwell
was a CIA officer from 1964 to 1976.

The CIA is still using narcotics and guns to destabilize low
income black and Hispanic inner cities in the US, according to Gary Webb in
his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine
Explosion (1998).

Many people suspect the CIA had a hand in the assassination of John
Kennedy. In December 1963, less than a month after JFK's death, even
ex-President Truman said, "For some time I have been disturbed by the way
the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an
operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of the government."
Another time, Truman referred to the CIA as the Gestapo.
Already distrustful of the CIA, after the Agency's Bay of Pigs
debacle in 1961, Pres. Kennedy--suspecting sabotage by the Agency to
embarrass, intimidate and control him--threatened to "smash the CIA into a
thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind." Instead he fired CIA
Director Alan Dulles who after JFK's death, was appointed by Pres. Johnson
to the Warren Commission. JFK also fired Dulles' deputy, Charles Cabal
whose brother Earl was mayor of Dallas in 1963 and may have been
responsible for rerouting the Kennedy motorcade around the Book Depository
in Dealy Plaza in order to slow down the cars for the snipers.
There was celebration in at least one CIA station when John
Kennedy's execution was announced, reported Hinkle and Turner in The Fish
is Red.

The 'Arms Race'--What could be better for business?

But the greatest single grafter of the Cold War and perhaps all of
American history was Pres. Lyndon Johnson. Early in his climb to the
summit of US politics, Johnson got in bed and stayed there with the Brown
brothers of Brown and Root Construction Company. Especially since his days
in the Senate, Johnson arranged contract after contract for the Browns and
was rewarded handsomely with kickbacks not only for his election campaigns
but for his own piggy bank. In Vietnam, Brown and Root constructed
military bases and helped make Johnson the richest president ever, far more
wealthy than Pres. John Kennedy.

The number of Americans who owned stocks rose from five million in
1950 to twenty million in 1965 and thirty-one million by 1970. "They never
rushed in faster than in the year 1968," according to David Hapgood in The
Screwing Of The Average Man (1974). During that remarkable year marked by
the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots at the
Democratic Convention in Chicago and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the
withdrawal of LBJ and the election of Richard Nixon, Wall Street was
making it's own history in the average man's chips faster than ever before
or since. In the first five months of that year, Merrill Lynch alone
opened 181,000 new accounts, wrote Hapgood.

"The Vietnam War alone generated 'business' to the value of $200
billion," according to Matthew Smith in his book Say Goodbye To America:
New Perspectives On The JFK Assassination (2001). Smith believes JFK was
murdered on orders from big business which he was in process of divesting
of power in favor of the people.

The Mother of All Bumperstickers

A popular bumpersticker during the Vietnam era was "WAR IS GOOD
BUSINESS; Invest Your Sons." Now with women like Jessica Lynch in combat
in Iraq, we need only add to the sticker,"And Daughters."
Fighting communism was a lucrative growth industry until the fall
of the Berlin Wall. Authentic WW II Nazis helped set the agenda for the
World Anti-Communist League headed for a time by John Singlaub of
Iran-Contragate infamy, according to Scott and Jon Anderson in Inside The
League (1986). Rev. Sun Myung Moon, ultra-rightists in Israel, Klaus
Barbie (until he was imprisoned in France), and the CIA teamed up to create
the "death squads" of Latin America. Not only power but profit was their
motive. And money makes such strange bedfellows. No?
Then as now, the ancient Buddhist warning goes unheeded--"Beware
lest you become what you fight."

Saint Ronald, Patron of Plutocrats

During the Reagan Administration, 11,000 people died in Nicaragua,
50,000 in El Salvador and 100,000 in Guatemala, most of them civilians and
most victims of CIA-trained police, soldiers and militia, according to Noam
Chomsky in The Culture of Terrorism (1988). By the term "terrorist
culture," Chomsky meant the US government. Today the US Army's
"Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"--formerly known as
the "School of the Americas"--at Fort Benning, Georgia, is the world's
foremost educator of torturers and assassins.

During the Reagan era, the Iran-Contra hearings investigated the
illegal trade of guns to Iran in exchange for that country keeping
American hostages till after the 1980 election in order to make Pres. Jimmy
Carter look feeble. This was a Machiavellian scheme arranged by George H.
W. Bush, former director of the CIA, who was rewarded with the nomination
for vice-president. After Reagan and Bush took office, "The
congressional inquiry took considerable care not to learn too much that
would be unpleasant," wrote Chomsky.

It was at this time that a young Sen. John F. Kerry
(D-Masschusetts) and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) came on highly and
loudly critical of the dirty deal early in the hearings, only to fall
silent later on as if they got the offer you can't refuse like those
obviously refused by the Kennedy brothers and more recently Sen. Paul
Wellstone (D-Minn.) who just might be the Democratic frontrunner in 2004
had he not died in an airplane "accident" in October 2002.

A country doesn't get to be a superpower by playing nice-nice.

Does it?

Saving the World for Democracy

"A Texan is president again and this country is fighting a war
again. Beyond that, there seems to be few parallels between the Vietnam
War and the war on terrorism," wrote D. Jablow Hershman in Power Beyond
Reason: The Mental Collapse of Lyndon Johnson (2002). Fast moving events
in Iraq and elsewhere since she wrote the book may have changed her mind.
Bechtel and Brown and Root (now called Kellogg, Brown and Root) are
in Iraq together with Halliburton and other US corporations
"reconstructing" the devastated country. Gross "overcharges" by these
companies are frequently reported even by the corporate media. Pres. Bill
Clinton gave Pres. Bush a budget balanced on the backs of those who could
least afford it, and Bush has already turned it into one of America's
larger deficits. So is a Democrat president going to change much for the
good? I don't think so.

In the Mideast as everywhere else US oil and arms merchants as well
as the CIA wheel and deal, they leave behind corruption , hatred of
America, drug trafficking, and death, according to Anthony Sampson in The
Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (1977), and Chalmers Johnson in
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000).

Solutions

So we know humankind's number one problem. And the solution is
simple--take the profit out of war. Energy and defense industries need to
be nationalized. The intelligence community needs to be greatly downsized
and must have genuine oversight by the most powerful and effective union in
the USA--The California Correctional Peace Officers Association. The media
monopoly needs to be smashed into a thousand pieces and scattered to the
wind. And Amy Goodman needs to have her own TV network funded by donations
no larger than $5. Most importantly politicians need to be held to a
higher standard than any other citizen.

US Army guards of honor at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at
Arlington Cemetery in Washington, DC, have to pledge no use of alcohol or
profanity for the rest of their lives. Why should politicians be held to a
lower standard?

Conflict of interest among elected officials should be the only
offense punishable by death. And lastly, politicians who support these
suggestions need to be hidden away in safehouses all over the universe.

"Oh, when will you ever learn? Oh, when will you ev-ver learn?"
This was the refrain of an anti-war song popularized by Pete Seeger in the
60s--Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

The essayist has been an activist more than four decades. Early in 2003,
he was a human shield in Iraq. In September 2003, he witnessed Pres. Bush
sign into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act. He is a member of many
progressive organizations including Stop Prisoner Rape, Alliance for
Democracy and Veterans For Peace.