War was planned long before 9-11

Dick Cheney, vice president of the US, famously remarked to Paul O'Neill, before he was fired as Treasury Secretary, that Ronald “Reagan proved deficits don't matter.”A future official might come to say that Bush Jr proved that high crime, treason and murder don't matter.

In the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001, there was much media coverage of suspicious movements of capital into and out of the stock of airlines involved in the attacks just days prior to and after September 11. There were grave worries that among stock traders lurked not only some who knew of the pending attack, but who are inhuman enough to seek to profit from so much death. The popular response to news of the possible profiteering made clear that people consider crime that benefits in the tragedies suffered by others is just about the worst kind of crime imaginable.

Yet, the documented war profiteering pursued by Kellogg Brown and Root in particular, a subsidiary of Halliburton, surely qualifies as every bit as twisted a scheme as any that might have played the markets on September 11. Whereas there is no way to know whether those who did profit that day were directly involved in creating the tragedy that occurred, we know that those who have profited very well in the illegal war on Iraq are very much the same people as those who created that tragedy, which in fact is much worse.

Several current and prominent members of the Bush regime signed a document submitted to previous president Bill Clinton in 1998 that explicitly stated that war on Iraq was necessary, and that the matter of whether or not it could be justified with claims of Saddam Hussein stockpiling weapons of mass destruction was irrelevant. Deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz, explicitly said that the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was never something that needed to be proved since it was only a postulation around which he and his group could gather political support for their already established plan to make war on Iraq.

It worked. Democrat candidate for president John Kerry is on record voting in favour of war on Iraq based on the horrifying claim, if one was inclined to believe it, that Hussein had targeted nuclear bombs on England.

Now that it has been concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only did no such weapons exist in Iraq, but that also there was no good evidence of their existence either, there have been inquiries launched into how such a drastic mistake could have been made. Nothing will come of any such inquiries because there was no mistake. The claim of weapons of mass destruction was deliberately fabricated. By whom we can only speculate, and for what reason we can only suppose. But until official investigations take up the matter with some vigour, speculate and suppose is what we must do.

A recent arrest of an alleged Israeli spy in Washington has led to FBI speculation that Israeli covert policy had been creating conditions in Washington that would lead that country to destroy Iraq, a very mistrusted neighbour of Israel's.

The fabricated claims about weapons in Iraq, however, seem at this point to have emanated mostly from Ahmed Chalabi, who was, until charges of embezzlement were laid against him earlier this year, Washington's favorite to take over in Iraq. Chalabi had the ear of such neo-con luminaries as Richard Perle and Irving Kristol, in addition to defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz. Some commentators have speculated that Chalabi, who now finds refuge from the law in Iran, might have provoked the administration to attack Iraq to rid Iran of the enemy it fought a bitter all-out existential war against throughout the 1980s.

But both these claims seem tangential and merely instrumental at best within a still larger narrative. Though national political and religious aims in war are the stuff of exciting novels and ripping histories, too often it is the banality of mere money that lies at the root of the urge for attack. Certainly it takes a confluence of aims presented by a grouping of different people to gather the political will to make war. But while national defence, religious rights and the like motivate a population to give up their young to the battlefields, the primary motivator in most wars among those who call them is the financial one. Profiteering is not a byproduct of war, it is the chief purpose of war.

What are they so worried about?

For a country so bristling with defence and so ready for attack, it is worth noting that American soil has never been genuinely or definitively attacked. Hawaii was not a state until 1959, so Pearl Harbour was not an attack on America—nor was it unprovoked, since America had by then been operating a 90-plus day long blockade of all oil shipments to Japan using the 7 th fleet. There has been no investigation into who the perpetrators of the September 11 attack were, nor into the extraordinary dropping of intelligence and defence on that day that made the attack successful. It was more likely an internal sabotage.

On the other hand, the US naval historical center at the department of the navy estimates that there have been 74 instances of United States forces being dispatched abroad for hostile purposes in the 59 years since the close of World War II. They count 237 such occasions since 1798. These figures do not include covert offensive operations, like the removal of Mosedegh in Iran in 1956.

Arguably on not one occasion has America ever been called out to defence, and yet this country has gone on the offense about once every 10 months since it was founded, according to their own military's historical record. Despite that glaring and disturbing fact, US presidents throughout have enjoyed increased popularity with American citizens—sometimes dramatically increased to the point of frenzied patriotism—whenever the troops are dispatched on of their very many offensive missions around the world. One might be justified saying that that country is addicted to war.

Certainly the economy and some of its biggest players are. The US military budget is a staggering $700 billion this year. The figure does not include “black ops” spending, which is a secret even to Congress, and has been estimated by credible sources to be as large as $250 billion annually. With special spending this year and next on war in Iraq, total US military spending will probably top $1 trillion.

American businesses have largely succeeded in the world because they have enjoyed access to raw resources from around the world. They have enjoyed that access largely due to the enormous globe-straddling citizen-funded military that relentlessly attacks every year any governing jurisdiction that threatens to impede the flow of resources at low cost to American industry.

Constant war is an extension of American trade policy. While Halliburton can obviously be accused of profiteering in the current war in Iraq, no less so can just about every big manufacturing company in American history be accused of war profiteering, since they all made good profits by exploiting the cheap available resources from around the world pried loose by their huge, always active, and very offensive military machine. Eisenhower warned about the US military industrial complex. But it's the entire American economy that is the military industrial complex. The country exists because it has all along made ferocious and constant war on the rest of the world.

That is why the crime against humanity that is the decade of sanctions and the two attacks on Iraq, the treason in sending over 1,000 servicemen to their deaths on a pack of deliberate lies, and the murder in killing perhaps tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, does not matter in America. It is constant crime, treason, and murder conducted by successive occupants of the highest executive office that has put America where it is at today. And though they may block their ears to avoid hearing it, too many American citizens know this truth.

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