Many people get killed in Iraq, but many rich people are also making a killing there

1. Soldiers Die, CEOs Prosper -- by Derrick Z. Jackson (from Boston Globe)

More than 2,600 US soldiers have died in Iraq. July's toll for Iraqi civilians was 3,500, the deadliest month of the US occupation. Iraq's civil war is on pace to kill 25,000 to 30,000 civilians by year's end. If you add in the tens of thousands of deaths from the 2003 invasion (we do not know the exact number because the Pentagon won't comment), researchers will inevitably say that the body count has crossed 100,000.

All of this madness to stop a madman, Saddam Hussein.

The litany of US mistakes and excessive force has the Pentagon commissioning at least two secret strategy studies in Afghanistan and Iraq. "This is a struggle for the soul of the Army," said Colonel Peter Mansoor, the head of the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center.

Just as odorous, a mountain of corporate cash grows next to the piles of bodies. In this bizarre war where Iraqi civilians fear both suicide bombers and the United States, the biggest sacrifice that President Bush asked of American civilians was to get on a plane and show those terrorists a thing or two by going to Disney World.

Defense contractors took that request to a logical extreme. They built their own fantasy land.

There is no evidence of a contractor having a soul in the 13th annual Executive Excess CEO survey by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, and the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. The report found that 34 defense CEOs have been paid nearly $1 billion since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

As soldiers have died in displaying personal patriotism, the pay gap between soldiers and defense CEOs has exploded. Before 9/11, the gap between CEOs of publicly traded companies and army privates was already a galling 190 to 1. Today, it is 308 to 1. The average army private makes $25,000 a year. The average defense CEO makes $7.7 million.

"Did this surprise us? No, because we've been watching since Sept. 11," said Betsy Leondar-Wright, communications director for United for a Fair Economy. "While the rest of us were worrying about terrorism and mourning the people who died, the CEOs were maneuvering their companies to take advantage of fear and changing oil supply, not just for competition but for personal enrichment."

The top profiteers after 9/11 were the CEOs of United Technologies ($200 million), General Dynamics ($65 million), Lockheed Martin ($50 million), and Halliburton ($49 million). Other firms where CEO pay the last four years added up to $25 million to $45 million were Textron, Engineered Support Systems, Computer Sciences, Alliant Techsystems, Armor Holding, Boeing, Health Net, ITT Industries, Northrop Grumman, Oshkosh Truck, URS, and Raytheon.

While Army privates died overseas earning $25,000 a year, David Brooks, the disgraced former CEO of body-armor maker DHB, made $192 million in stock sales in 2004. He staged a reported $10 million bat mitzvah for his daughter. The 2005 pay package for Halliburton CEO David Lesar, head of the firm that most symbolizes the occupation's waste, overcharges, and ghost charges on no-bid contracts, was $26 million, according to the report's analysis of federal Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

"Those examples take the cake, especially because it's all related to their government contracts, which is money straight out of the taxpayer's pocket," Leondar-Wright said.

The Executive Excess report, with the help of the Wall Street Journal's 2006 survey of executive compensation, made similar observations of oil executives as their firms enjoy record profits during war. The pay gap between the average oil and gas CEO and the average oil worker is 518 to 1. The general national CEO to worker gap is 411 to 1. The report said that the typical oil construction laborer would have to work 4,279 years to match the $95 million pay last year for Valero Energy CEO William Greehey.

This is so out of line that the authors of the Executive Excess report recommend wartime pay restraints for defense CEOs and a permanent congressional watchdog panel for contract fraud and waste. Companies that cannot adhere to restraints should be ineligible for contracts, they said.

The report said "democracies decay when one segment of society flourishes at another's expense." Leondar-Wright said, "It is now at the point where we have lost any sense of proportion. There is no sense of shared sacrifice, no sense that we're all in this together." Spreading democracy to Iraq is far-fetched when defense and oil CEOs speed its decay at home. They are all in it for themselves, at our expense.


2. When War is on the Horizon, Follow the Money -- by Gary Ferdman and Myriam Miedzian

Pop quiz: Who founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq?

A. A prominent Iraqi political exile.

B. Bruce Jackson, former Lockheed Martin vice president

C. Neoconservatives William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz.

Answer: b.

What does this mean? To understand our nation's foreign policy, including military interventions, follow the money.

This should come as no surprise. Our country is built on the profit motive; we proved its effectiveness by outlasting the Soviet Union.

While Americans understand that making money motivates McDonald's or Wal-Mart, and some are concerned about businesses donating large sums to influence politicians, most are unaware of how the profit motive helps shape U.S. foreign policy.

This is caused in part by our leaders draping decisions, especially wars, in patriotism. Take Iraq; President Bush leads Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, has weapons of mass destruction, and threatens our national security. Once he invades Iraq, any questioning is portrayed as endangering our troops and homeland.

By the time most Americans realize that none of it is true, thousands of young soldiers are killed or maimed and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are flowing to often incompetent, politically connected Pentagon contractors.

For most decent, caring Americans it is almost unthinkable that the profit motive played a significant role in putting our soldiers in harm's way. It is painful to acknowledge that we have been lied to, and to ask, why? Why was this war started? What role did our president's, vice president's, and secretary of state's close ties to the oil industry play? Which powerful American companies stood to profit?

Bruce Jackson founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, a few months after retiring from Lockheed Martin. In 2001, he and other members of the neocon Project for a New American Century wrote to President Bush stating that "American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means." A year earlier, Jackson had chaired the subcommittee that produced the Republican Party's foreign policy plank that George Bush ran on in 2000.

Any chance that the views Jackson promoted had something to do with the billions that Lockheed Martin pockets thanks to the war?

For war profiteers, soldiers returning maimed or in caskets, and a $500 billion Pentagon budget paid for by the taxes of ordinary citizens, are externalities -- costs and consequences borne by others.

There is nothing new about weapons manufacturers encouraging wars and profiteering from them.

During the Civil War, President Lincoln stated that those profiteering from defective weapons "ought to have their devilish heads shot off."

The role of weapons manufacturers in creating the tensions that led to World War I is well documented, and no doubt influenced President Roosevelt's 1934 message to Congress that "the uncontrolled activities of the manufacturers, and merchants of engines of destruction," were a menace to world peace.

Profiteering was so common during WWII that then-Sen. Harry Truman became a national hero by bringing to heel war contractors whose waste and inefficiency threatened the war effort.

In his famous farewell address, President Eisenhower warned the nation of the "undue influence" of the military-industrial complex, and the need to control it.

As the war in Iraq grinds on at a cost of more than $250 million per day ,and another contractor-heavy organization, the Iran Policy Committee, calls for a pre-emptive strike against Iran, there is a dire need to act on his warning.

Just as government food inspection and child labor laws were enacted to protect us against the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation, our government must assure that corporate interests do not trump the national interest in foreign policy.

Pentagon contractors' congressional allies routinely defeat or bury in committee initiatives that could curtail war profiteering. This June, for example, all 55 Senate Republicans voted to kill an amendment strengthening laws governing waste, fraud and abuse in defense (43 of 45 Democrats voted for it).

In his farewell address, Eisenhower called for "an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" to stand up to the military industrial complex. Isn't it time to heed his call and demand that our representatives rein in the war profiteers?

(Myriam Miedzian is the author of "BOYS WILL BE BOYS: Breaking the Link between Masculinity and Violence." Gary Ferdman is former executive director of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, dedicated to increasing federal support for education and health care using funds spent on Pentagon weapons.)


3. Mercenary Jackpot – by Jeremy Scahill (from THE NATION

While the Bush Administration calls for the immediate disbanding of what it has labeled "private" and "illegal" militias in Lebanon and Iraq, it is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its own global private mercenary army tasked with protecting US officials and institutions overseas. The secretive program, which spans at least twenty-seven countries, has been an incredible jackpot for one heavily Republican-connected firm in particular: Blackwater USA. Government records recently obtained by The Nation reveal that the Bush Administration has paid Blackwater more than $320 million since June 2004 to provide "diplomatic security" services globally. The massive contract is the largest known to have been awarded to Blackwater to date and reveals how the Administration has elevated a once-fledgling security firm into a major profiteer in the "war on terror."

Blackwater's highly lucrative "diplomatic security" contract was officially awarded under the State Department's little-known Worldwide Personal Protective Service (WPPS) program, described in State Department documents as a government initiative to protect US officials as well as "certain foreign government high level officials whenever the need arises."

A heavily redacted 2005 government audit of Blackwater's WPPS contract proposal, obtained by The Nation, reveals that Blackwater included profit in its overhead and its total costs, which would result "not only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit to profit." The audit also found that the company tried to inflate its profits by representing different Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies.

The WPPS contract awarded in 2004 was divided among a handful of companies, among them DynCorp and Triple Canopy. Blackwater was originally slated to be paid $229.5 million for five years, according to a State Department contract list. Yet as of June 30, just two years into the program, it had been paid a total of $321,715,794. When confronted with this apparent $100 million discrepancy, the State Department could not readily explain it. Blackwater's two years of WPPS earnings exceed many estimates of the company's total government contracts, which the Virginian-Pilot recently put at $290 million combined since 2000. Six years ago the government paid Blackwater less than $250,000.

"This underscores the need for Congress to exercise real oversight on the runaway use of secret companies that have strong connections to the Bush Administration, for clandestine services all over the world," says Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, a leading Congressional critic of private military companies.

"This whole business of security is just insidious," says former Assistant Defense Secretary Philip Coyle, who worked at the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001. "The costs keep going up, and there is no end in sight to what you can spend. What happens is you keep raising the threat levels to require more actions and more contracts to overcome these imaginary threats. It's an endless spiral."

In soliciting bids for the 2004 global contract, the State Department cited a need born of "the continual turmoil in the Mid East, and the post-war stabilization efforts by the United States Government in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq." It said the government "is unable to provide protective services on a long-term basis from its pool of special agents, thus, outside contractual support is required." Coyle, now with the Center for Defense Information, believes the privatization of security duties historically fulfilled by US Marines and other active-duty military is directly related to the Iraq occupation. "Obviously the military could do it, but indeed the Administration is looking for places to get more troops for Iraq," Coyle says.

While the WPPS program and the broader use of private security contractors is not new, it has escalated dramatically under the Bush Administration. According to the most recent Government Accountability Office report, some 48,000 private soldiers, working for 181 private military firms, are deployed in Iraq alone. Blackwater, now one of the most prominent and successful companies providing soldiers in Iraq, was relatively unknown until March 31, 2004, when four of its contractors were ambushed and killed in Falluja [see Scahill, "Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater," May 8]. In the days and weeks that followed, company executives hired ultra-connected lobbyists and were welcomed by powerful government officials as heroes, allowing the firm to solidify its role in the Bush Administration's foreign policy apparatus.

Since 2003 Blackwater has held the high-profile job of guarding senior US officials in Iraq, including all three occupation-era ambassadors. The vaunted WPPS contract was awarded at the end of Paul Bremer's tenure in Baghdad. Blackwater, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment, refuses to divulge where its forces are deployed under the program. WPPS documents say contractors may be dispatched almost anywhere, including on US soil. The State Department says explicitly that there is a "long-term" need for these "protective services." Schakowsky says she will request a formal explanation from the department of the WPPS contract: "We need to know why the Bush Administration keeps writing blank checks to Blackwater and others, while it keeps Congress and the American people in the dark."


4. Blackwater Shot Down in Federal Court -- by Jeremy Scahill

In a major blow to one of the most infamous war profiteers operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans, a federal appeals court has ruled that a wrongful death lawsuit filed against the mercenary firm Blackwater USA can proceed in North Carolina's state courts. The suit was brought by the families of the four Blackwater contractors ambushed and killed in Falluja, Iraq on March 31, 2004. Blackwater had tried to have the same case dismissed or moved to federal court.

"I've been bawling ever since I've heard the decision," says Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was killed in Falluja, his charred body hung from a bridge. "It's been overwhelming. I am so glad that they ruled this way. Blackwater has stalled and stalled. Look at the hundreds of millions of dollars in profits in Iraq and New Orleans they've made since my son was killed. It's time to go to trial and let the chips fall where they may."

The lawsuit , filed in January 2005, alleges that Blackwater cut corners in the interest of profits, leading to the brutal deaths of the four men: Scott Helvenston, Jerko "Jerry" Zovko, Mike Teague and Wes Batalona. "It has now been more than a year and a half since the lawsuit was filed, and Blackwater has managed to stall and frustrate the litigation," Marc Miles, an attorney for the families, told me. "I anticipate that this matter will now be on a fast track to trial, and believe that a jury will ultimately find Blackwater liable for its wrongful conduct in causing the deaths of these four Americans."

In its motion to dismiss the case in federal court, Blackwater argued that the families of the four men are entitled only to government insurance payments under the federal Defense Base Act. Many firms specializing in contractor law advertise the DBA as the best way for corporations servicing the war to avoid being sued. "What Blackwater is trying to do is to sweep all of their wrongful conduct into the Defense Base Act," says Miles. Blackwater spokesperson Chris Taylor told the Associated Press, "We are reviewing the decision."

Blackwater argued in its appeal that the four men "were performing a classic military function...with authorization from the Office of the Secretary of Defense that classified their missions as 'official duties' in support of the Coalition Provisional Authority" and therefore any court, federal or state, "may not impose liability for casualties sustained in the battlefield in the performance of these duties." In other words, because Blackwater was supporting the occupation with its forces, the company is immune from damages or lawsuits. The court said this argument "proves too much" to permit, saying Blackwater's "constitutional interpretations" were "too extravagantly recursive for us to accept."

The ruling Thursday by the three-judge panel of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals gives "the green light" to a trial that the families believe will show that Blackwater was ultimately responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, says attorney Miles. The incident sparked the first US siege of Falluja, in April 2004, resulting in the deaths of more than 600 Iraqis.

"The message that this ruling sends to Blackwater is that it must now face the evidence in this case, including answering tough questions and producing critical documents, which it has refused to do for more than a year and a half," says Miles. "Blackwater cannot be allowed to get away with murder and that's what they're trying to do," adds Helvenston. "There's got to be accountability."

(Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at The Nation Institute. He can be reached at jeremy@democracynow.org)


5. Making a killing: Lewis Lapham on the spoils of war

Lewis Lapham writes a knockout satire on the conduct of war by the Bush administration along with a scarifying history of war profiteering in the September Harper’s. Here are some excerpts – section titles are mine.

Liberals, “idle moralizers,” have got the war all wrong

Although the reports from Baghdad this summer might seem to suggest that all is not well with Operation Iraqi Freedom – the city a blood-smeared ruin, the American Army hiding in holes – the impression is misleading. Understand the war on terror as free-market capitalist enterprise rather than as some sort of public or government service, and in the nightly newscasts we see before us victory, not defeat.... Measure the achievement by the standards that define a commercial success – maximizing the cost to the consumers of the product, minimizing the risk to the investors – and we discover in the White House and the Pentagon, also in the Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, not the crowd of incompetent fools depicted in the pages of the New York Times but a company of visionary entrepreneurs, worthy of comparison with the men who built the country's railroads and liberated the Western prairie from the undemocratic buffalo.

The war has been extremely successful. Here are the numbers.

During the five years since the striking down of the World Trade Center towers, the United States Congress has appropriated well over $300 billion for the Bush Administration's never-ending war against all the world's evildoers. Now flowing eastward out of Washington at the rate of $1.5 billion a week, much of the money takes the form of no-bid contracts, cost-plus and often immune from audit – at least $12.3 billion to Halliburton; $5.3 billion for Parsons Corporation; $3.7 billion for Fluor Corporation; $3.1 billion for Washington Group International; $2.8 billion for Bechtel Corporation.

The contracts specify the repair and reconstruction of Iraq's depleted infrastructure – roads, power plants, hospitals, oil fields, pipelines, schools, mosques, and sewer systems – but because so many of the project sites have been deemed unsafe for visitors, the invoices translate into art objects, intricately and lovingly decorated with surcharges for undelivered concrete and nonexistent electricity.

So also the goods and services with which private security companies supplement the American military effort in Iraq. The Pentagon furnishes 130,000 troops, many of them National Guard Reservists, poorly paid, inadequately equipped, and held against their will for extended tours of duty; the private companies field an additional 50,000 personnel, some of them earning upward of $150,000 a year for driving trucks, cleaning latrines, flying helicopters, pitching tents. Unhampered by U.S.Army regulations or by Iraqi law, the military guest workers are most conspicuously employed as bodyguards for the cadres of American middle management requiring, in the words of one of the advertising brochures, "discreet travel companions" or a "heavily armored high profile convoy escort." For a discreet companion armed with an assault rifle and a record of prior service under the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Blackwater USA charges $600 a day, plus a 36 percent markup for expenses – travel, weapons, insurance, hotel room, ammunition.

For the friends of the free market operating in Iraq it doesn't matter who gets killed or why; every day is payday, and if from time to time events take a turn for the worse – another twenty or thirty Arabs annihilated in a mosque, a BBC cameraman lost on the road to the airport – back home in America with the flags and the executive compensation packages, the stock prices for our reliably patriotic corporations rise with the smoke from the car bombs exploding in Ramadi and Fallujah – Lockheed Martin up from $52 to $75 between July 2003 and July 2006; over the span of the same three years, Boeing up from $33 to $77; ExxonMobil up from $36 to $65; Chevron up from $36 to $66; Halliburton up from $22 to $74; Fluor up from $34 to $87.

In a country that recognizes no objective more worthwhile than the one incorporated in the phrase "to make a killing," I don't know why so many people insist on withholding their applause.

There’s a long history of successful war profiteering: “The words ‘merchant’ and ‘mercenary’ ultimately derive from the same root...”

When King Richard the Lionheart joined the Third Crusade at Acre in 1191 and there failed to find the treasure promised by God, he insisted that the infidels had swallowed their jewels and gold coins in order to deny him the reward owing to his royal majesty and Christian virtue. His companions, less discreet than the ones currently for rent in Basra and Tikrit, cut open the stomachs of 3,000 Muslims in the search for truth, which, in the event, proved as determined, if eventually as disappointing, as the Bush Administration's quest for the thermonuclear genie in Saddam Hussein's magic lamp.

...The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed the business of colonial empire to regulate the trade in Asian spices, American fur, and African slaves. The cost of the increasingly expensive weapons made it impossible for individual entrepreneurs to compete with the larger corporate interests, but even when enlisted under the banners of an English king or a French dynast (among them Napoleon, who informed Austria's Prince Metternich, "You can't stop me. I spend 30,000 men a month"), an enterprising mercenary still could look forward to a fair return on his investments – a share of the prize money, the beginnings of an art collection, a chance to rape good-looking women.

How do you imagine America got a firm footing in the world?

Our American forefathers understood the rules of the game. The first settlers of the New England wilderness constituted themselves as a society of acquisition as well as a community of God. A seventeenth-century governor of New York bankrolled Captain William Kidd's Caribbean expeditions in exchange for a share of the pirate's takings under primitive laws of eminent domain; the old spirit of adventure manned the American privateers plundering British merchant ships during the Revolutionary War, fortified the real-estate speculation otherwise known as the Mexican War, ensured the elimination of the Indians on the trans-Mississippi frontier, backed the 1898 raid on Cuba, drummed up Wall Street's enthusiasm for America's participation in President Wilson's war to end all wars.

The twentieth century's two world wars obscured the primacy of the profit motive as the only casus belli deserving the consideration of true patriots. Over the course of the thirty-one years between 1914 and 1945, so many people were killed to no apparently remunerative purpose that the world's spiritual advisers and political theorists were put to the task of coining expensive idealisms to explain the lack of an owner's commercial interest on the part of the innumerable decedents. Voices of conscience on five continents contributed an impressive range of consumer choices – fascism, liberalism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, racism, Nazism, socialism, Serbian irredentism, etc. – but so great was the confusion in the minds of men living under the shadow of nuclear extinction that it needed another thirty-five years, thirty-five years and the coming to the White House of the blessed Ronald Reagan, before the Americans could find their way home to the meaning of warfare as it was understood in the age of chivalry.

How better to describe our reunion with the wisdom of the Renaissance than as the triumph of American conservatism, the happy return to the smile of immortal selfishness that shines forth in the face of President George W. Bush. The smile is well and truly earned. His administration has so improved the business of making war – broadening the market for the product, relocating the costs and exporting the collateral damage, coming up with innovations both technological and aesthetic – that none of the principal beneficiaries need go to the trouble of learning how to lift a sword or ride a horse. The dying is done by the hired help, by our now privatized and outsourced army, or by entire regiments of auxiliary civilians deployed as targets for the staging of Pentagon air shows. None of the combatants demand a share of the spoils, which accrue on clean well-lighted computer screens far from the fear and smell of death. More politically sophisticated than the condottieri of the Italian Renaissance, our own military industrial elites not only extract tribute from foreign legates in distant provinces but also hold to ransom the citizenry of their own country, accepting payment in the form of taxpayer contributions to the Holy Grail otherwise known as the federal military budget.

Lapham quotes Rainer Werner Fassbinder

In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism.


6. This is a bit over the top, but the guy’s heart is in the right place.

Corporate Globalization and Middle East Terrorism -- by Charles Sullivan (from Information Clearing House)

By now the whole world knows that America is none of the things that she purports to be; that is, everyone except the Americans. It is said that America has fifty states but in fact she has fifty-one, Israel being the fifty-first. Perhaps Great Britain could be counted as the fifty-second.

It is ironic that the people who think they are the freest are the most controlled people on earth. It is equally odd that those who think they are part of the greatest democracy the world has ever known do not participate in a democracy at all; nor do they recognize one when they see it. These facts attest to how thoroughly the American people have been propagandized by the corporate media.

A controlled people have no will of their own. They believe what they are told, and they do what their government tells them to do. They have little intellectual curiosity about the world and rarely, if ever, question authority, much less challenge it. They have little or no knowledge of their nation’s history, and are a frightened and timid people that have no conception of reality. None are more effectively enslaved than those who think they are free. Americans are slaves to a corrupt system that preys upon them and tells them how well they are treated.

As America ’s fifty-first state—Zionist Israel influences American foreign policy nearly as much as the corporations that run the government. On Capital Hill the Zionist lobby rivals the power of even the wealthiest corporations. The Pentagon, in particular, is heavily influenced by Zionists, and chief among them are Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Michael Rubin. The combination of Zionism and corporate Plutocracy is a particularly deadly and violent one; a perfect storm that has gathered over the Middle East and rained corpses upon the land in a cyclone of savage violence without end.

The evidence visibly demonstrates that both the American and Israeli governments are savage terrorist states. I make a clear distinction between the people and their respective governments; although the people must bear some of the responsibility for what their governments do. Recent reports from Amnesty International make clear that both nations deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure—including roads and bridges, water sanitation facilities, electrical generating stations, ambulances transporting the wounded to hospitals, rescue workers recovering the dead, and even women and children seeking refuge in bomb shelters. Other humanitarian NGOs have uncovered similar findings.

Not only are such events an abomination, they are acts of extreme cowardice; the work of madmen intoxicated by transitory power in pursuit of private wealth.

The Israeli and American governments have little regard for life, or human freedoms. Both thoroughly propagandize their own people and call themselves democracies. They are known to kidnap, imprison, torture, and assassinate their foes without due process. Both possess nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the world many times over. The world surely remembers that America is the only nation to hold human life in such low regard as to actually deploy the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , even with Japan ’s eminent surrender at hand.

These governments are guilty of the same war crimes that the Nazi leadership was executed for after World War Two. They have histories of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The blood of innocent people runs warm on their hands, and they continually thirst for more.

It is clear that neither America nor Israel is interested in a negotiated peace in the Middle East . Both governments intend to force capitalism upon the region by systematically invading and occupying the Arab states. Their stated intent is to denationalize the immense natural wealth of the region, and turn it over to private corporations; to force the Islamic Arab states to join the World Trade Organization, and to accept capitalism as the new religious order. Some kind of Middle East Free Trade Agreement will likely be brokered at gun point, and the corporate fire sale will commence. Similar plans exist for other parts of the world.

Forget what the talking heads on the television tell you, and ignore the idiocy spewed forth by conservative talk show hosts; America ’s Middle East policy has nothing to do with threats stemming from the development of nuclear arsenals, or imaginary terrorist plots to maim and kill, as reported in the corporate media. Such claims are useful propaganda, shameless promotions created to deceive a gullible people into believing there is an eminent threat to their freedoms that must be dealt with militarily. None of it is true.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was foretold in a document titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century.” This paper was authored some six years ago by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and a host of neocon luminaries who are always clamoring for war. It provides the blue print for what is to come, but it is conveniently ignored by the corporate media.

If the neocons and their Zionist allies succeed, Iran will also be invaded and occupied, followed by Lebanon and Syria . Other states will follow, insuring that America and Israel remain in a state of perpetual war for the next hundred years. Preemptive strikes are the modus operandi. The plan calls for permanent military bases throughout the region, and the U.S. is already constructing fourteen permanent bases in Iraq .America has no intentions of leaving until the last drop of oil runs dry, and Iraq ’s natural wealth has been privatized.

The larger purpose of the American-Israeli Middle East policy is to force capitalism onto the region. If they are successful, the occupied territories will fall under virtual martial law, and virtual U.S-Israeli rule. The dollar will become the currency, and every Arab state will be forced to join the WTO, and to comply with its laws. Membership in the WTO effectively renders a nation’s Constitution and its laws null and void. WTO membership is a key element in the new world order envisioned by the world’s wealthiest people.

The independent Arab states will be coerced into accepting loans from the IMF and the World Bank. A key feature of these loans is that they require the state to open its borders to private ownership and foreign investors (privatization). That is what occurred in Iraq when the Bremer orders were issued. A puppet government is installed to lend the appearance of legitimacy to the process. Some kind of Middle East Free Trade Agreement will likely be brokered at gun point; the inhabitants will eventually lose their cultural identity and become westernized. Imagine downtown Baghdad with a McDonalds at every corner, and Wal-Mart Super Centers all around.

This is the New World Order envisioned by George Herbert Walker Bush—corporate governance by the world’s wealthiest individuals. For everyone else it will be a world-sized gulag with all the accoutrements of a concentration camp.

Western capitalists break into a cold sweat when they think about the money to be made. They see private wealth in the form of the Middle East ’s immense oil reserves, cheap exploitable labor, and the millions of new consumers that capitalism demands.

Any nation that resists corporate globalization will be labeled ‘terrorist states,’ and subjected to military invasion. The imperial invaders will declare that these states are developing nuclear weapons and present an eminent threat to the U.S and its allies. The corporate media will report that we are bringing democracy to the Middle East . All of this should sound hauntingly familiar.

Once the groundwork is laid, the invasion of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, and all of the corporations that are plundering Iraq can begin in earnest. Some 150 American corporations are already reaping billions in stolen Iraqi wealth. That is just the beginning.

The masters of war are promoting their agenda of corporate globalization by equating the resistance to free trade with terrorism. As all things Bush, this is just marketing hype and brazen lies—pure propaganda. By linking resistance to free trade to terrorism in the public mind, the perpetrators expect to market future wars and more occupations to the people who will be required to carry them out.

Speaking truth in America is becoming tantamount to an act of sedition, or terror. We already know what happens to terrorists in Bush World.

Acting as America ’s fifty-first state, Israel ’s elite will also reap the economic spoils of war, and expand its power throughout the region. She will then be in position to police the territory, and to put down insurrections with weapons made in the USA .

Much of the world already knows that democracy and capitalism are an oxymoron. As we can see (if we are willing to look), capitalism and free trade oppresses human freedoms, rather than foster them. Do the people of Iraq feel liberated? Their country is being divvied out to corporate predators, while America holds a gun to their heads. When will we remove our blinders and see with clear eyes? Every atrocity that America and her allies accuse their enemies of committing, they have themselves committed. Will we ever remove our blinders and see with clear eyes?

There will never be peace as long as capitalism thrives and men without souls occupy human flesh. Nations will be carpet bombed, and millions of innocent people will suffer and die horribly. The corporate CEOs and their share holders view this as a small price for others to pay, so long as they profit.

In an article published in The New Yorker this week, Seymour Hersch exposed the Pentagon’s covert plot to invade Iran . The corporatocracy considers Iran as the crown jewel of the Middle East . What the Plutocrats did not count on, however, was the fierce resistance the occupying forces have encountered in Iraq , where nothing has gone according to plan. Beyond the green zone there is no part of the country that is safe. The world’s most powerful military cannot defeat the building guerilla resistance that continues to grow and intensify. In Lebanon , the world’s second strongest military was unable to defeat Hezbollah and its antiquated weaponry.

While these are viewed as ominous signs for the New World Order, they are an indication that there may be justice in this world after all. The fierce resistance to occupation by the Palestinians on the West and Bank and the Gaza Strip, the spirited defiance to occupation in Iraq , and the repulsion of the Israeli military from Lebanon are cause for hope. They are victories for the people against their oppressors. Apart from the aggressors, the world recognizes the right of all peoples to resist foreign occupation and to determine their own fate. It is a moral duty. There is hope in resistance. Someone once said, “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

In their unfathomable hubris, both the Israeli and the American governments have seriously underestimated the spiritual strength and determination of the freedom fighters resisting corporate globalization. They will never stop fighting until the occupiers have been driven out, as occupying armies always are. The invaders can kill the majority of the population with their sophisticated weaponry, but those who remain will expel them, as the Vietnamese expelled the U.S. from Viet Nam . History has taught us these lessons again and again, but we Americans do not know history; nor do we want to know it.

Sources:
The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time, Antonia Juhasz, May 2006
Rebuilding America ’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, Dick Cheney and others.
National Security Strategy of the USA , Dick Cheney and others, September, 2002.
Dick Cheney’s Song of America, David Armstrong
A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, Richard Perle and others, 1996
Watching Lebanon ,Seymour Hersch, New Yorker, August 21, 2006
Mad Dog on a Leash, Sheila Samples, Dissident Voice, August 15, 2006
Democracy Now!, Pacifica Radio Network, various dates

(Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer residing in the hinterland of West Virginia . He welcomes civil comments at csullivan@phreego.com)