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Iraq Thread
"The enemy is operating in smaller cells with every bit as lethal capabilities as we have, but they can turn on a dime," Rumsfeld says in an interview.
Defense secretary shifts his focus to the Pentagon
FY 2005 – Department of Defense Budget (PDF):
Procurement: US$ 75,905,000,000; R & D: US$ 68,942,000,000
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If the enemy has every bit as lethal capabilities without such a budget there is finally proof that this spending is nothing more than buying big toys and company welfare. Ask for your taxes to be returned immediately.
Other news:
Powell asks for European troops in Iraq
Iraq ; Abuse continued in Abu Ghraib even after scandal became public
US appeals Geneva protection for imprisoned bin Laden driver
More U.S. Soldiers Survive War Wounds
Six Iraqi national guards, 10 civilians wounded in Mosul attacks
@b there is finally proof that this spending is nothing more than buying big toys and company welfare oh dear, back to an issue which has long troubled me: contemporary capitalism thrives on waste and irrelevance. that is, the most “profitable” (i.e. the most middlemen and niche parasites squeeze the most profit out of it) way of doing something is inevitably a stupid, wasteful and corrupt way. the efficient, effective, and honest way would provide far less opportunity for profiteering, skimming, theft and so forth.
take the US medical care system (please!) — it’s grossly inefficient. as was pointed out recently by one critic, it spends more money simply on gatekeeping, i.e. denial of service, than it takes in profit. its materials and supplies are grossly overpriced. middlemen are raking off huge profits throughout the food chain, and as a result the whole system is creaky, stupid, and delivers poor service for very high costs compared to other systems. measured by fairly objective actuarial rulers like life expectancy, general state of public health, years of survival post-therapy, error rate, number of persons served per dollar invested — it’s a joke. yet it is “profitable” in the sense that legions of parasites make a living off it, and those legions would be without livelihood if the system were made effective, efficient, and honest.
ditto the US industry of death — let’s call it frankly what it is — the industry which manufactures the materiel of war and repression. the weapons industry now represents, per the last figures I’ve read, about 25 percent of US GDP. the US is the largest arms dealer on the planet, leading its rivals Russia, England, France by an enormous factor — I think US companies get something like 45 percent of all arms sales worldwide, not to mention their sinecure providing disposable toys to the “largest command economy still going,” the US military and spook establishment.
so the US economy is not just pathetically dependent on foreign oil, it is pathetically dependent on manufacturing armaments. it is pathetically dependent upon its oil dependency to provide the casus belli for the endless wars it depends on to absorb the surplus stock of munitions and provide perpetual job security for its death-industrialists. yes, I meant that — there are influential power players who don’t want to see any end to US dependency on foreign oil because that would reduce the tendency of the US to engage in foreign wars, and that would reduce profits for a very large sector of its economy.
in other words, if the NT Jesus appeared tomorrow and said, “Y’all stop killing each other now, y’hear?” in accordance with the Commandments and the Kingdom of Peace and all that, the US economy would collapse overnight, a quarter of its GDP disappearing, millions of socialised jobs disappearing, one of its few remaining export markets gone.
the same critique can be applied to many other subsystems… safe, efficient public transport is less profitable than a sprawling chaos of private car-based transport. there are more opportunities, more niches for parasitism and waste and “externalised costs” (which always offer a profit opportunity for someone who proposes to remedy or abate them) in the car-culture than in a train or bus based culture. every “traffic accident” means revenue for legions of car repair shops, doctors, morticians and so on. the practise of transporting food thousands of miles to be packaged and processed and then thousands more miles to be sold on shelves is insane, yet it generates enormous parasitical opportunities in transport, packaging, processing, etc.
it’s the fundamental paradox of monetism and capitalism, imho, that the churning of money — money changing hands, profits being made — is read as the sole indicator of success and well-being; and yet the maximal opportunity for such churning is found in a maximally dysfunctional society. in other words, you can sell a lot more water filters where the water system is compromised and people need to buy them to compensate for that dysfunction. every person dying of cancer (from cigs, from industrial toxicity, from background radiation) represents enormous profits for the cancer care industry.
every misfortune, loss, ailment and dysfunction that people have to spend money to deal with or correct, represents profit for some opportunistic entrepreneur or parasitical niche organism; and thus when we are told to worship profit, for its own sake, in the abstract, we are being encouraged to celebrate waste, loss, sickness and incompetence as these generate the most money-churning activity.
I’m hardly the first to catch on to this contradiction — it’s a fundamental plank of the challenge to neolib econ. but it strikes me with renewed force reading b’s text above — as we consider the “war economy” and the billions and billions (hat tip to old Carl) of bucks being spent to try to be more lethal than some third world insurgents with refurbished AK47s. you are just as dead whether killed by a $45,000 burst of high-tech munitions or a $5 burst of lead from a thirty year old Soviet machine gun. the only difference is that someone pays a lot more for the first kind of death, and that means that someone makes a sh*tload of money delivering it.
the criminality, disorder, and wastefulness of war makes it a maximally profitable activity and therefore one to which capital naturally gravitates — along with drugs and prostitution, the traditional quick-buck businesses. perhaps this is a corollary of Gresham’s note about bad money driving out good — though I think he was more concerned with metallurgical quality at the time… anyway, the absurdity of US military expenditure is imho part and parcel of “maximally parasitical capitalism” imho.
Posted by: DeAnander | Dec 9 2004 19:45 utc | 5
The Pentagon’s Neurosis
Fallujah Gulag
By DOUGLAS LUMMIS
The U.S. Military, the newspapers tell us, has conquered Fallujah. But here you must read the news carefully. It seems that the U.S. military is in control of (most of) the area of Fallujah, and of (what is left of) its buildings, but not of its people. The people, some 300,000 of them, are outside the city, waiting to go home.
So the U.S. Military is facing a dilemma. The point of the Fallujah operation was to make it possible to hold elections in January. To carry out elections in Fallujah, the U.S. Military will have let Fallujah’s residents return home. But what if, after they return home, they start fighting against the U.S. occupation, as they did before?
According to a December 5 article by Ann Barnard in the Boston Globe, the U.S. military has devised a plan to solve this dilemma. They are going to “funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans.” Then they will give each person a nametag, which they will be required to wear at all times. Presumably people not wearing nametags will be in danger of being seen as guerrilla fighters, and shot.
The Military also wants to organize all Fallujan men into “military-style battalions”, and force them to work, cleaning up and rebuilding the destroyed city.
It seems the U.S. military is still under the illusion that in Fallujah there are two types of people, “terrorists” and “ordinary residents”.So if you can distinguish which is which, and allow only the “ordinary residents”, clearly marked, back into the city, peace will be achieved. But when the “ordinary residents” return to the city, some of them will surely resume guerrilla operations – especially after they see what has been done to their homes.
To prevent this, they will be organized into work battalions, probably under U.S. or Iraqi military commanders.
So this is the point to which these American Bringers-Of-Democracy have been driven to? Where can we find a parallel for the kind of social organization they are planning? In German history, the concentration camp. In U.S. history, the relocation centers of World War II. In Russian history, the gulag.
I think this mad “Fallujah plan” will, or should, go down in history as one of those perfect, crystalline moments when imperial domination shows its true nature. During the Vietnam War we had the immortal words, “We had to destroy the village to save it.” That summed it all up beautifully. The Fallujah Plan expresses the same contradiction. To save Fallujah’s “freedom” it has to be destroyed as a city and turned into a prison.
But is it possible to transform an entire city of angry people into a prison? Is it possible to “process” 300,000 people, “process” meaning, transform them from citizens into prisoners in their own city, all in a couple of weeks to be in time for the election? This sounds less like a plan than a mad fantasy dreamed up by a group of people frustrated and driven to the wall. The U.S. military assault on Fallujah succeeded. It was, Pentagon officials boast, a great military victory. The U.S. Military did everything a military can do. They shot the people they could shoot, wrecked the buildings they could wreck, and took control of the city. If the city of Fallujah is its land and buildings, they have won it. But if the city is its people, they have not won it. When they let the people back in, they will be back where they started. They won, and yet they lost. No wonder they are beginning to show neurotic symptoms.
Douglas Lummis is a political scientist living in Okinawa and the author of Radical Democracy. Lummis can be reached at: ideaspeddlers@mpd.biglobe.ne.j
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 13 2004 22:49 utc | 54
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