Two Years in Office: Obama, Fiasco President (Part III)

Although military Keynesianism started to propel only decidedly with Reagan, the next three governments encouraged it without rest. But it was under Bush Jr. and the complete control of the neo-conservatives and their “perpetual war” politics that the military industrial complex was consolidated as an engine of “development and globalization,” and the industries and central services of destruction and death as propellants of the “market economy.”

In full economic recession, during 2007, 2008, and part of 2009, while the real estate and automobile sector was paralyzed, the sale of aircrafts, armored vehicles, military ships and artillery materials increased by 53 percent from the previous year. Armed conflicts like those in Afghanistan or Iraq have, in the last decade, increased international military spending by 45 percent. All of this does not count the quantities that were generated by the smuggling of weapons. Obama has maintained and expanded this approach. The military interventionism and arms race took new momentum under his government, now thinly disguised by the Nobel Prize as politics of peace.

With the predominant approach of preventative global war, the exterior politics are exclusive to the Pentagon and its generals. In international relations, the hands of Secretary Hillary Clinton play a subsidiary role of diplomatic protocol.

In the Middle East, destruction continues under the direction of its associate Israel. With Obama, the United States maintains its occupation in Iraq, but he has installed his main war base in Afghanistan and his strategy is concentrated on Central Asia, all the while without ceasing expansion in Africa and Latin America. The main difference with his four predecessors is the emphasis on the hypocrisy of his demagogy. In December 2010 the United States’ Congress approved a defense budget of $708 million for 2011. This budget is divided into two parts: $549 million for national defense programs and $159 million for military interventions abroad, mainly in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also designates $75 million in 2011 to train and equip military groups in Yemen in order to “fight against insurgent groups.” These continued United States aerial attacks against Yemen in December 2009 resulted in the death of numerous civilians, including women and children.

The 2011 budget constitutes the biggest military budget in the history of the United States. In 2010, 57 percent of the total U.S. budget was given to military operations. It is not only the biggest military budget in the world but also surpasses the combined military spending of the rest of the world. In 2010 it reached $680 million. In 2009 it was $651 million and in 2000, $280 million. That is to say, in 10 years it multiplied by a factor of 2.5.

The War Resisters League estimated that actual military spending in 2009 was $1.449 billion instead of the official figure of $651 million. The National Priorities Project, the Center for Defense Information and the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation analyzed and revealed significant hidden military spending, introduced in other parts of the general U.S. budget. The subsidies of war veterans as well as military pensions are not counted in the budget. Neither is the spending of 26 information agencies that depend on the Pentagon, nor the nuclear arms programs under the Secretary of Energy. One of the greatest secrets is of the interest on the debt contracted in previous wars, which reached between $237 and $390 million in 2009. What constitutes a perpetual subsidy for the banks is in reality closely linked to military industries.

The Obama administration not only continued the war privatization of the Bush era but instead accelerated this process. In 2010, contractors surpassed 70 percent of total personnel of the Department of Defense. Hundreds of thousands of Pentagon contractors are making a fortune in the war. This is the most dynamic capitalist fraction of the U.S., which is an indicator of the ethics of the economy. It is a sector dictated by the arms race, which includes more categories beyond war arms, munitions and transportation. The categories include all types of industries and services. The difference is that every one of them focuses training, logistics and goods specifically for war. Medical services, for example, are not dedicated to pediatric, maternity, geriatric or preventative health care, but rather more specifically for injuries and mutilations from munitions and explosives and to prevent and attend to ailments produced by conditions imposed by war.

When we speak of the military-industrial complex we refer to all production and services that are pushed toward the continuation and expansion of war, and in the case of medical services, resources are taken from general state spending in normal public services. But at the head of that convoy of hundreds of thousands of war contractors is the engine made up by the powerful arms manufacturers and proponents of military aggression, the industries and services dedicated exclusively to the production of death. And those great Pentagon contractors have been the principal beneficiaries of the scheme. One percent of the big contractors take in 80 percent of all the money designated by defense contracts. The 50 biggest contractors obtained more than half of all of the money from the Pentagon’s contracts; the first 10 received almost 40 percent.

The fantastic earnings of these weapon conglomerates have been reflected in the continual growth of their actions and values on Wall Street: “The U.S. Defense companies’ actions have tripled their value since the beginning of occupation in Iraq, without showing any sign of decreasing (…) All of these defense companies — with very few exceptions — have obtained overwhelming success with growth which is shown in double-digit earnings for the majority of these companies (…) The feeling that ship, aircraft and weapons constructors are making significant strides can be seen in the actions of major contractors of the Pentagon: Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., and General Dynamics Corp., with profits being higher than ever…”*

Lockheed Martin, for example, a major contractor for the Pentagon in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, is among the top 10 contractors for 13 of the 20 categories of industries and services dedicated to the war. And it has bought companies that are dedicated to categories in which they have not intervened. They bought Systex, which lent services for “interrogators” to the Pentagon and, with that acquisition, also providers and torturers.

In four months, from June to September 2009 — the first year of the Obama administration — there was a 40 percent increase in contractors to the Department of Defense in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of private security contractors doubled.

The United States has conducted a mock recall in Iraq, but in reality the U.S. occupants continue with hundreds military bases in the country, maintaining 50,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of mercenaries and holding Iraq bank accounts. In 2010 the U.S. sold to the puppet government of Iraq weapons valued at $26 million, a purchase similar to that made by the Pentagon to the weapons industry. The United States sells and buys at the same time while paying with Iraqi bank accounts. The weapons industry celebrates.

The United States has promoted the creation of death troops, and religious confrontation is daily manifested through terrorist atrocities, which have transformed Iraq into the country with the most number of forced disappearances in the history of the world. It also maintains a puppet government that promotes religious sectarianism and every kind of prejudice — a government that, together with Afghanistan, holds the title of being among the top three most corrupt in the world.

With Obama, there was a shift in the center of preventative global war from Iraq to Afghanistan. At the same time, there is a major effort by Obama and the Pentagon to control the narrative of the Afghan war in the United States. The majority of American mainstream media outlets were gathered as cooperative partners in the control of the news given by the Pentagon, and they have various “built-in journalists” dedicated to military misinformation. The repeated story of the presence of al-Qaida in Afghanistan is an expanded hoax by the mass media that acts as a screen in front of the real reasons.

One of the main reasons that the U.S. is occupying the country is to control the world’s principal source of opium for the international heroin market and a major world producer of hemp. Washington anointed the warlord Hamid Karzai for his long list of services to the CIA, and he maintains his position as president through fraudulent elections, even though he is actually in cahoots with his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a patron of opium trafficking and Afghan hemp. After the American invasion the Helmand River continues to water poppies. The Afghan economy is a narco-economy: In 2007, Afghanistan produced 8,200 tons of opium, a figure that represents 53 percent of the GDP and 93 percent of heroin traffic in the world.

Already in December 2005 it was alleged: “In a drug conference in Kabul this month, the chief of Russia’s federal anti-narcotic services estimated that the current level of opium cultivation in Afghanistan is $65 billion. Only $500 million goes to the Afghan cultivators, $300 million to the Taliban and the $64 billion left over goes to the ‘drug mafia,’ guaranteeing itself ample funds to corrupt the government of Karzai in a country where the GDP is only $10 million.”* According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, only between five and six percent of those $65 billion — between $2.8 and $3.4 billion — stays in Afghanistan.

The United States is a guardian of the world drug production network. It either supports or directly leads the main countries dedicated to its production: in Afghanistan, opium, heroin and hemp; in Morocco, cannabis and hemp; and in Colombia and Peru, cannabis, coke leaves and all the other variations of cocaine.

The other objective in Afghanistan is to initiate a new, more aggressive military operation against Pakistan, a country of 160 million inhabitants that has nuclear weapons, which precludes a direct American intervention. It intends to destroy the Pakistani Islamabad government and plunge the country into civil war, balkanization and general chaos. This strategy seeks to export an Afghan civil war toward Pakistan and perhaps also disintegrate Pakistan along the lines of ethnicity. In Afghanistan, the United States has always encouraged the repression of the Tajiks in the Pushtun, the central base of the Taliban and excluded from power in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai, of Pushtun origin, reserves his loyalty to the CIA before his own ethnic group. Since 2009, the U.S. has extended operations to the Pakistani Pushtun territory, including mass murder by unmanned aircraft, killings on behalf of the CIA and reportedly the use of private mercenary snipers against peaceful villages and wedding parties, among other objectives.

The appearance the intervention in Afghanistan has taken seeks to provide the U.S. with a platform from which to launch a military campaign to destabilize the entire region based on ethnic disputes through attacks, bombings and massacres. The other ethnic group that Obama’s strategy seeks to launch an insurrection and secession against are the Baluchistan of Iran. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA finances the murderous Jundullah organization. Washington’s dark operations have also invaded Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet state of 25 million inhabitants that borders Afghanistan in the north. Terrorist mercenary commandos run missions in Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to U.S. intelligence sources.

In addition, under Obama the military invasion in Afghanistan has not become “more humane,” and neither has it reduced civilian casualties termed with the euphemism “collateral damage.” On the contrary, during 2009, under McChrystal, the forces of the United States and NATO depended less on the deadly air strikes that are between four and 10 times more lethal for Afghan civilians than terrorist attacks. The terrorist confrontations resulted in increased American soldier casualties. Then in 2010 Obama changed tactics and got rid of Petreaus’ “counterinsurgency approach to win hearts and minds,” replacing it with a trio of outright lethal killing forces: aerial attacks, unmanned aerials bombings and night raids by Special Operations Forces.

A report from the U.S. Defense Department, required by Congress, recognized in November 2010 that the violence in Afghanistan was at a higher level from when the war started nine years ago and added that the progress achieved by the efforts headed by NATO in that country has been limited. The same report states that the combat incidents recorded from April 1 to Sept. 30, 2010, increased by 300 percent in comparison to the figures of 2007. And in that half-year there were 55 percent more violent acts in comparison to the previous trimester.

The fact that the greatest military effort is concentrated in Central Asia does not mean that the U.S. has neglected other continents. Since October 2007 the U.S. African Command has existed, first under the wing of European command, but since 2008 as an independent entity. AFRICOM is divided into five military districts (reflecting the five regional economic communities of the African Union), every one of them with a multinational African Standby Force trained and led by American military forces, NATO and the European Union. AFRICOM plans to establish a general headquarters on the continent (its actual headquarters is in Stuttgart, Germany, although Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, with more than 2000 troops, serves as a de facto headquarters in Africa) with five advanced regional satellite positions in north, south, east, west, and central Africa; and all of these, according to the United States and the European Union, are for missions of “peacekeeping.” The objective is to facilitate imperialist military interventions, to ensure there will not be failures like the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia, imposed by the U.S. at the end of 2006, as a cable at the time, recently published by WikiLeaks, demonstrates.

In Latin America we witnessed the multiplication of military bases with the creation of seven military bases in Colombian territory and signed treaties with Panama for the installation of 11 military bases in that country. Among other initiatives in this style in Central America is the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet of the Navy of the United States, armed with nuclear devices. There is also military invasion in the name of “humanitarian aid” after the earthquake in Haiti and the initiatives of a state coup in Honduras (successful in 2009) and Ecuador (failed in 2010) and the plans to destabilize countries like Paraguay, Bolivia and Venezuela.

On Nov. 22, 2010, Evo Morales was inaugurated to the Ninth Conference of Defense Ministers of Defense of the Americas in the city of Santa Cruz, with the participation of representatives of 28 countries. Evo snapped at a hieratic Bob Gates, then a U.S. ambassador in La Paz in 2008, when Philip Goldberg “organized” a blow to end his government and Washington blamed this on the coups in Venezuela, Honduras and Ecuador. In his address he said that the United States had encouraged and encourages processes to destabilize democratic governments, adding that their intervention does not contribute to peace on the continent.

Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize made Obama a true haranguer of war in favor of imperialist war. He praised the virtues of preventive war and outlined a number of potential targets of U.S. aggression, which included Iran, Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Somalia and Yemen. All of these countries have either attacked openly or covertly. In the ink bottle remains dozens of countries where they covertly intervene in military matters.

*Editor’s Note: These quotes, while translated accurately, could not be verified.