-Caveat Lector- Vol. 8, No. 2006W - The American Reporter - December 29, 2002 http://www.american-reporter.com/2006W/1.html On Native Ground THE WAR RACKET LIVES ON by Randolph T. Holhut American Reporter Correspondent Dummerston, Vt.
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - "The capitalists are so hungry for profits that they will sell us the rope to hang them with." This apocryphal quote, attributed to Lenin, springs to mind as I watch the Bush administration continue its preparations for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Buried within Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration that was presented earlier this month to the United Nations is information that the Bush administration found so embarrassing, it edited out 8,000 pages before it presented the report to the 10 non- permanent members of the UN Security Council. What is the Bush administration trying to hide? Perhaps it is the list of U.S. companies that helped to arm Iraq. The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung recently published a list of 24 major U.S. companies named in the Iraqi report that illegally aided that nation's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs in the 1980s. Some of the familiar names on the list include Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Du Pont, Rockwell, Eastman Kodak, Bechtel and Unisys. Only Germany (which had 80 firms aiding Iraq, some as recently as last year), had more business ties to Iraq than the U.S. In addition, Die Tageszeitung reported that the U.S. government itself offered plenty of assistance to Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. The Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce and Agriculture all covertly assisted Iraq's weapons programs in the 1980s. Even the Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons laboratories pitched in by training Iraqi nuclear scientists and giving them non-fissile material for construction of a nuclear bomb. To see the Bush administration accuse Iraq of deception in the UN dossier while censoring the same report to protect U.S. corporations and the government itself from scrutiny in arming Iraq is merely the latest example of President Bush's brazen hypocrisy in trying to ram a phony war down our throats. Seeing U.S. companies arming potential enemies for fun and profit is nothing new. In the years leading up to World War II, several major corporations aided the fascist cause up to and, in some cases, well after Pearl Harbor. Henry Ford supported Adolf Hitler and lent the Nazis money from the early 1920s until the start of the war. The House of Morgan fronted Italian dictator Benito Mussolini $100 million to keep his government from going bankrupt and many other American banks lent money to Hitler and Mussolini. Standard Oil (Esso then, Exxon now) and Texaco both sold gasoline and other petroleum products to Francisco Franco's army in Spain and to the German and Italian military forces up to and after Pearl Harbor. Esso was a member of the same industrial cartel as I.G. Farben and shared patents with the Germans for making high octane aviation fuel and synthetic rubber. Other corporations that were members of Nazi cartels included Alcoa, General Electric, General Motors and Du Pont. GM's Opel subsidiary in Germany built the planes and tanks for the Panzer divisions all the while GM dragged its heels at home building equipment for the U.S. military. Pratt & Whitney, Curtiss-Wright and Douglas Aircraft all sold aircraft parts to Hitler. Curtiss- Wright salesmen demonstrated the then-secret technique of dive bombing to the Germans in order sell its planes. The histories of the "Good War" tend to gloss over this stuff, but all of this was documented by the late muckraking journalist George Seldes in his 1943 book, "Facts and Fascism." And, if the revelations in the UN dossier are true, nothing much has changed in the decades since World War II. Given the track record of American capitalism, there's no reason not to doubt otherwise. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler laid it out back in 1935 when he wrote that "war is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." It was only after he retired from the Marines that Butler said he realized that he had spent the bulk of his 33 years in the Corps as "a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers" as "a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism" in carrying out military operations on their behalf in China, the Philippines, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Haiti. In looking back on his experience as a "gangster for capitalism," Butler said in a 1933 speech that he "could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." And the racket continues. Vice President Cheney's old company Haliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, has picked up billions of dollars in contracts building military bases around the world for U.S. forces in the "War on Terror." George H.W. Bush sits on the board of the Carlyle Group, the investment firm which also owns several defense contracting firms. The oil companies are salivating over the chance to control the sizable oil reserves in Iraq. And the defense contractors have been raking in the dough since the Sept. 11 attacks and will be making even more money when Persian Gulf War II begins as expected sometime in late January. Butler, who died in 1940, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor twice and had a far better knowledge of the true costs of war than any current member of the Bush administration. He once said that "there are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket." Nearly 70 years after Butler said those words, war remains a racket and corporations still have no problems cutting deals with dictators if there's a buck to be made. Remember this as the propaganda campaign for Persian Gulf War II starts revving up. Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). Copyright 2002 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved. A<:>E<:>R ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Forwarded as information only; everything sent has to stand on its own merits, not on my recommendation. Dissenting ideas are the health of the American system. 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