Iraq: war is hell, but it's also a pretty profitable racket

1. Bush tells Rush he's 'deeply concerned' about the US leaving the Middle East – from RAW STORY

During an interview with conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh, US President George Bush expressed deep concerns about the possibility of the United States leaving the Middle East, raising fears that extremists could topple governments to "control oil resources."

"Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you," Bush said. "I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East."

Bush said that he was "worried that rival forms of extremists will battle for power, obviously creating incredible damage if they do so; that they will topple modern governments, that they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West."

"People say, 'What do you mean by that?'" The president continued. "I say, 'If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.'"

"You couple that with a country that doesn't like us with a nuclear weapon, and people will look back at this moment and say, 'What happened to those people in 2006?' and those are the stakes in this war we face," Bush said.

"On the one hand we've got a plan to make sure we protect you from immediate attack, and on the other hand we've got a long-term strategy to deal with these threats, and part of that strategy is to stay on the offense," Bush continued. "Part of the strategy is to help young democracies like Lebanon and Iraq be able to survive against the terrorists and the extremists who are trying to crush their hopes, and part of the democracy is for a freedom movement, which will help create the conditions so that the extremists become marginalized and unable to recruit."

Limbaugh called Bush's comments "extremely visionary."


2. Bush's Permanent War Economy Must Crash (Before it Endangers You and Your Bank Account Even More) -- by Heather Wokusch

“War is a racket. It always has been.” -- Major General Smedley Butler

The Bush administration's military adventurism and the economy are two issues expected to impact next week's US midterm vote. We ignore their interplay at our peril.

Rarely discussed is how the endless war on terror requires a permanent war economy, with taxpayers subsidizing the military industry at the expense of domestic social programs and global security. In 2000, for example, the US military budget was roughly $289 billion, but the administration's military budget request for 2007 has soared to $462.7 - and that doesn't even include funding for military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The term "permanent war economy" was coined in the mid-1940's by the former CEO of a General Electric subsidiary, who called for increased subsidies and corporate control over the military industry. But this administration has taken the collusion of war and societal restructuring to new and dangerous levels.

Quickly after becoming president, for example, Bush rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty forbidding nuclear-test explosions, thus encouraging other holdouts (such as North Korea) to use US intransigence as justification for building up their own nuclear-weapon programs. He withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, requesting billions for a boondoggle missile "defense" program instead. He abandoned the Biological Weapon Convention draft Protocol which bans the development and use of biological weapons, and he balked at an international agreement to limit the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons. Bush also ignored the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by repealing the ban on low-yield nuclear weapons and pumping funding into nuclear weapons programs.

Just last week, the administration rejected future arms-control agreements for outer space, and even more glaringly, the US became the only country in the United Nations General Assembly to vote against a global Arms Trade Treaty. A full 139 countries voted for the Treaty, aimed at limiting weapons transfers to conflict areas and keeping weapons out of the hands of major human rights abusers. Scandalously, only the US voted against it.

Bush's rejection of arms control agreements and heavy funding of domestic weapons programs has been exacerbated by a stunning lack of regulatory controls. Just a few examples:

A federal report released last month revealed that the US military has not properly tracked almost half a million weapons (ranging from rocket-propelled grenade launchers to machine guns to sniper rifles) meant for Iraqi security forces; it can be assumed that at least some of those weapons were subsequently used against US forces. US military has not properly tracked almost half a million weapons
The Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee reported missing 200 keys to protected areas in 2004. This discovery followed reports of missing master keys in both the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The same year, news surfaced that security personnel guarding the nation's nuclear stockpiles, including tons of enriched uranium at Y-12, had been cheating on their antiterrorism drills. An Energy Department investigation discovered that contract security guards at the Y-12 plant had been given access to computer models of antiterrorism drill strikes in advance, thus rendering the tests useless.
In July 2004, all classified work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was temporarily stopped due to a security breach; two "removable data storage devices" with top-secret information couldn't be located.
Arguably even more troubling, in June 2006, it was revealed that the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) database had been hacked and the personal records of at least 1,500 employees and contractors stolen. The NNSA amazingly took over seven months to report the theft to the Energy Department.

Sloppiness in weapons oversight is just one result of the Bush administration's war-based economy; a ravaged domestic budget is another. When Bush took office in 2001, for example, the annual surplus was $284 billion. He turned that surplus into a deficit of $248 billion by 2006, a staggering loss of over $530 billion in five short years.

And more tough times are ahead. Analysts warn that the US economy is heading for a "correction" in the winter (i.e. post-election nosedive), due to a variety of factors including out-of-control military spending, an unsustainable housing bubble, Asian lenders increasingly eager to dump US assets, and the Bush administration's inclination to stop propping up the economy if the resulting downturn can be blamed on the Democrats come 2008.

Yet few politicians are addressing these bread-and-butter issues. So before you head to the polls next week, make sure that your preferred candidates understand the dangers of perpetuating Bush's permanent war economy - your financial future, if not your life, may depend on it.

Action Ideas:

Read Major General Smedley Butler's 1935 classic "War Is a Racket"
Learn about Cracking Down on War Profiteering and ending the Culture of Corruption in Government Contracting at the Corporate Policy site. Corporate Policy Find out which industries fund your congressional candidates at Open Secrets. Open Secrets
Learn more about the arms trade and military expenditure at Global Issues. An excerpt from fiscal year 2005: Global Issues - The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six "rogue" states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion. - The United States and its close allies accounted for some two thirds to three-quarters of all military spending, depending on who you count as close allies (typically NATO countries, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea)

(This article was partially excerpted from The Progressives Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now (Volume 1). Heather can be reached at www.heatherwokusch.com The Progressives Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now)


3. For One California Profiteer, Iraq is Going Great -- by Sarah Anderson/AlterNet.org

"War is hell," Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once stated. This Civil War giant clearly did not hold stock in a major defense contractor.

For soldiers on the frontlines in Iraq, Sherman's words might still resonate. But for defense executives and their shareholders, the open-ended "War on Terror" has been anything but hell for the bottom line.

A look at the San Francisco-based URS Corp., a major provider of Pentagon engineering and equipment repair services, can help illustrate this hell-only-for-some reality.

URS recently ran a help-wanted ad for experienced mechanics to work in Iraq. The ad made the job sound only slightly less brutal than Sherman's March.

"Extreme danger, stress, physical hardships, and possible field living conditions are associated with this position," the ad read. "You should expect to work 12 hour days, seven days a week."

For mechanics who agree to these terms, URS offers $80,000 a year. Meanwhile, company CEO Martin Koffel made 180 times that amount last year in his somewhat less hazardous office environs on San Francisco's Montgomery Street.

The pay gap stretches even wider between Koffel and soldiers on the battlefield. Army privates made about $25,000 last year, extra combat pay and housing allowances included.

Koffel and URS are booming. One big reason: Equipment under war-time stress, as URS officials happily report, wears out five times as fast as equipment in peacetime. In all, the defense contracts that URS has snared have brought in over $1 billion in each of the three years since the Iraq invasion, compared to only a few hundred million in 2002.

URS stock, not surprisingly, is worth nearly five times what it was before the war started.

These stock gains have bloated CEO Koffel's personal bottom line. Last year, he cashed in more than $10 million worth of stock options, bringing his total compensation to $14.4 million.

In his good fortune, Koffel hardly stands alone, according to a study from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy (PDF). According to the report, CEOs at the top 34 publicly held defense contractors have doubled their averaged pay during the four years since the "War on Terror" began.

The highest-paid defense executive -- George David, the CEO of helicopter maker United Technologies -- has hauled in more than $200 million total over the past four years. The CEO of another company laden with Pentagon contracts, Health Net's Jay Gellert, has seen his pay leap over 1,000 percent during the post-9/11 period.

Health Net, thanks to Pentagon outsourcing, provides lucrative managed care services for military personnel and their families. The company is currently crowing about particularly strong demand for its mental health counseling services.

Some would argue that as long as defense executives keep their shareholders happy we shouldn't begrudge them their millions in compensation. But such excessive pay levels during wartime actually imperil our nation. War requires shared sacrifice, not personal aggrandizement. What kind of message do those on the front lines get when they see defense industry executives strike it fabulously rich year after year?

Massive payoffs for defense executives also muddy our nation's policymaking waters. We are creating, with these incredibly excessive rewards, an incentive for powerful, often politically connected corporate leaders to want to continue the war in Iraq -- or to start new ones.

So what should we do? For starters, we can overhaul government procurement standards. Current U.S. laws already deny government contracts to companies that discriminate against women and people of color. Why should we let our tax dollars subsidize war profiteering? Congress could put an end to this by requiring that all defense contractors restrain executive pay to reasonable levels during wartime. This restraint wouldn't need to be a fixed dollar cap. Procurement rules could instead deny defense contracts to companies that pay their top executives more than 20 times what their lowest-paid worker receives.

Today, unlike in William Tecumseh Sherman's day, we are fighting battles far from home, in Baghdad and Fallujah, not Atlanta and Gettysburg. But we shouldn't let these great distances from the hell of war blind us to this most basic of democratic truths: In times of war, no one ought to get rich off someone else's sacrifice.

(Sarah Anderson is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and a coauthor of the report "Executive Excess 2006: Defense and Oil Executives Cash in on Conflict," published by IPS and United for a Fair Economy.)