With no end in sight to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and covert wars involving special operations military occurring in Yemen, Pakistan, Somolia, along with a protracted bombing campaign in Libya, Americans must ask themselves where is the funding for the domestic economy?
The military industrial complex--that combination of congressmen, big businessmen in the defense industry and the Pentagon, has usurped the Constitution of the United States. At the command of President Obama Congress appropriates $700 million dollars on the joint U.S. Nato operation in Libya even though the legislature was not even so much as consulted before the Pentagon committed resources to this intervention, a violation of the Declaration of War, Article I section 8 of the U.S. constitution. As the Libyan intervention has far exceeded 90 days, Obama is also violating the War Powers Act of 1973, a law written by Congress to limit presidential war-making proclivities after the disasterous American occupation of Vietnam.
If that's not enough, the U.S. bombing of Libya--clearly an act of war and not a "kinetic action," as Obama alleges is killing innocent Libyan civilians while the U.S. simultaneously funds/arms the Libyan National Fighting group against Qaddafi. Libyan National fighting group contains Jihadist fighters connected to Al Qaeda, in stark hypocritical contrast to the Obama Administrations stance of opposing these similiar forces in Yemen(Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and Pakistan. This on it's face makes the entire "war on terror," a superficial resource wasting artifically constructed conflict against a loose group of individuals who clearly have no capacity to overtake the United States in any way shape or form, a complete fantasy laden lie!
Turning to other areas of the world, the bungled U.S. occupation in Afghanistan seems that it will continue indefinitely as the Pentagon states that it plans to still have 70,000 military occupying this country in 2014. What is the objective of this occupation anyways? Is it to give them a stable government? According to Peter Dale Scott's book American War Machine, during the 2010 U.S. military campaigns in population areas dominated by the Pashtun Persian ethnic group, such as Khandahar and Helmand Province, the Americans worked with the Afghan National Army to suppress Pashtun Taliban strongholds, yet there is an overepresentation of Tajiks from Tajikistan in the Afghan National Army. The Tajiks speak Dari, a form of Persian unintelligible to the Pashtun majority in these areas. So how is a stable government to come about when Tajiks, let alone Americans don't even speak the language of the natives they allege to be helping, but are really killing with disproporationate use of fire power every day? Four of the senior members presiding over the rampantly corrupt Afghan government are involved in the heroin trade. The recently assassanated brother of President Hamid Karzai,Walid Karzai, was a CIA asset who trained paramilitaries for the U.S. in Kandahar while simultaneously profiting off of collecting bridge tolls from the lucrative heroin trade that funds the Taliban at war with U.S. soldiers.
According to Leon Pannetta, there are fewer than 100 members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan anyways, so what is the purpose of staying in Afghanistan? Every night raid on homes or drone strike in which U.S. forces indiscriminately kill innocent civilians and then pay a cash compensation to the families of the slain serves to fuel the anger of the population, who resent being occupied, and as a consequence of this, side with the Taliban against the United States. What amount of cash can replace a lost human being?
Michael Hudson, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends says that ever since the Vietnam war, military spending has played a huge role in deindustrializing the American economy. This is due to the simple fact that spending money abroad destroying other people's lives and infrastructure and attempting to rebuild what the American government/and private corporate contractors want these countries to have is a scheme to make big business construction firms and weapons companies connected to corrupt politicans rich. This explains the big money involved not only in weapons production and rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, but also military base construction for foriegn occupations. Over 700 military bases varying in different sizes and built by private firms exist in Afghanistan alone.
"If you have a Pentagon contract—a Pentagon contract is cost-plus. The higher they[arms/defense companies] spend on airplanes, on armaments, the more money they get. So you have them engineering not to cut costs, but to maximize costs, because that’s how they make their profit," says Hudson. "So you have a warping of American engineering, American technology, towards the military, and that’s why the industrial core has been shifting to Asia, because they don’t have this military. The economy is being sacrificed to the military. And that’s somehow evaded discussion here."
A failed campaign of brutal occupation that killed three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans took enormous resources out of the U.S. economy that could have been spent creating productive government funded employment in the areas of construction, manufacturing and related industries in the U.S. Vietnam was only the start, as interventions in Panama, Iraq 1990 (Bush Sr.) Afghanistan, 2001, Iraq II, 2003, Af/Pak, Libya/Somalia II (Obama 2009-Present) Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia,(Clinton)have all provided the impetus for increased weapons production, which stimulates the economy at the expense of human lives, and in turn caused successive U.S. presidents throughout all of these years of intervention, to desire to use more surplus weapons and the power of the imperial presidency to start new wars. In addition, after the Kosovo and Iraq interventions, the Pentagon spent billions of tax payer dollars to build sprawling city-like military base communities replete with all of the amenities of a major urban city such as Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and Balad Air Base in Iraq while the subject group of the U.S. bombing campaigns were in many cases left without electricity or running water.
In 1961, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American people about the perils of what he coined "the military industrial complex" and how it took money away from services such as schools, hospitals and productive employment for Americans at home by squandering the money away on useless wars abroad.
"And we’re spending twice as much on the military as we did when Eisenhower gave that speech. So, we’ve got a huge imbalance in our budget," adds William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.
"You can’t really defend your country if people are sick, people aren’t healthy, people aren’t educated. So it’s kind of undermining the roots of the ability to defend the country, going forward, to throw money at weapons makers, to throw money at this huge military base infrastructure that isn’t needed for defense proper of the country. So, it’s completely out of balance, and we’re going to pay a price for that if we don’t turn that around."
EX-INTEL CHIEF SAYS IN RISKY GAME OVER OIL, NATO SUPPORTS AL-QAEDA REBELS IN LIBYA
WALID KARZAI A CIA ASSET
TROOPS SMUGGLE HEROIN
HALLIBURTON/CHENEY BANK OFF OF PRIVATIZING WAR SERVICES. WAR IS BIG BUSINESS
(C)Bill Lewis
Sources: Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine
Chalmers Johnson: The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism Secrecy and the End of the Republic
After Months of Partisan Wrangling, Wall Street & Pentagon Emerge Victorious on Debt Deal
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/2/after_months_of_partisan_wrangling_wall
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