It’s all going according to plan

 
It’s all going according to plan
 
Despite terrible news for American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, it isn’t certain that present conditions were both unforeseen or unplanned
 
 
by kevin potvin
 
As of this writing, February 23, 2006, the number of US and coalition troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in response to 9/11 has surpassed the number of people killed on that infamous day. The War on Terror exceeds by ten months the total duration of American involvement in World War II. The US lost 361 soldiers in the first six months of war on Iraq in 2003; they’ve lost 394 in the most recent six months. The American situation in Afghanistan is also running backwards: in 2002, there were 68 casualties among American and allied forces, while in 2005, there was nearly twice that number: 129. 
The ostensible justification for war on Iraq was American insistence that the country was harbouring weapons of mass destruction; none were found, but it is unlikely that history will record this as a mistake. Yet the real reason for the war remains a mystery.
There are those who, like The Republic, have argued that the point was to gain control over oil resources. Others have equally plausibly asserted that the war was to prevent Iraq from opening an oil trading market, using Euros instead of US dollars as a medium of exchange; that the Israeli lobby in Washington brought America into war to help eliminate its regional power rival; that the war was to establish military bases for a planned war on the much more fortified Iran; that the war was meant to destroy a compelling model of secular socialism that might spread revolution across the region, deposing US-friendly despotic regimes; that the war was manufactured to shore up slack business in the US military-industrial complex; or that the war was engineered by regional rival Iran. There are more.
There are almost as many assessments for how things are going for the Americans. A constant state of war in which a steady, but not unacceptable, number of mostly poor and ethnic Americans (or non-citizen, US residents), are killed, and a potential oil-fueled regional powerhouse that is forever torn apart with sectarian strife, may be exactly what serves the interests of US elites best. Certainly defence-related and oil-related US companies, which also have the biggest lobbying budgets in the US Congress, have done extremely well since the war began. ExxonMobil reported annual profits last month of US$36 billion for 2005. Though the war has cost the US government so far over US$245 billion, that has almost all been spent on procuring military equipment from US defence companies. Not a dime of the cost of the war has come from the pockets of the political elite in America; yet at the usual rates of return on investments, that elite has profited by something like US$20 billion on war-spending so far.
Is a home-team death rate of about two per day and a price-tag of about US$7 billion a month an acceptable public price to produce private profits at US defence and oil companies currently running at about US$11 billion a month? If so, then it isn’t certain that defence and oil companies would wish for any other outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan besides the one unfolding now.
Given the general lack of concern of most Americans, the feeble coverage of related issues in the American press, the silence of the American Congress, and the apparent health of the US economy, even with oil three times more expensive, is there anything really going wrong with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan? The answer is no: Though grim for the actual soldiers and their families, and certainly horrific for Iraqis and Afghanis, things are looking rosy for US defence and oil companies and their investors.
The President and the Secretary of State are former oil company executives; the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defence are former defence company executives. Nothing has been a mistake or an accident, from groundlessly blaming Osama bin Laden for 9/11, to illegally dispatching the government of Afghanistan, to making patently false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to feigning surprise at encountering a stiff insurgency, to getting caught tapping phone calls of American citizens, to releasing pictures depicting the torture of innocent men, to risking global confrontation over the Middle East, to blowing US$245 billion of public funds on pointless war, to losing as many soldiers as people killed on 9/11, to killing over 200,000 innocent Iraqis in an illegal war. It’s all going according to plan.