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CounterPunch
January
9, 2003
Is War Still
a Racket?
An Ex-Marine Compares Gen. Smedley
Butler's 1933 with 2003
By CHRIS WHITE
As a Marine serving on a ship in the
Pacific in 1997, the ship's commander ordered the dumping of
the ship's refuse into the ocean. I asked around to see if this
was a common event, as this was my first time at sea in the military,
and was told that the Navy had no other way of dumping while
at sea, and that it was standard procedure. In order to make
this environmental atrocity productive, the Marines used the
big, filled, plastic garbage bags as target practice. For a
good two hours, we fired thousands of rounds out of our .50 caliber
machine guns and sniper rifles at the trail of waste that stretched
for miles toward the horizon.
The above story is meant to illustrate how counterproductive
the military is, and this applies to this essay's discussion
of how the military is inherently bound to the interests of the
power elite, and against everything else, especially the defense
of freedom. After his retirement in 1931, Marine Major General
Smedley Darlington Butler, one of only two Marines in history
to have received two Medals of Honor, spoke out against the U.S.
government's use of force in world affairs. He wrote and spoke
of the way in which corporations profited from war, while countless
millions suffered as a result. This essay compares General Butler's
analysis of this process in 1933 with the use of war for power
and profit in 2003, with the goal of establishing that not only
has the racket expanded tremendously, but our national security
has correlatively reduced. I am not anti-American. I am an
ex-Marine sergeant and current doctoral student in history who
is concerned about the consistent destruction of this planet
and its people carried out by my government in the false name
of the promotion and defense of freedom.
Paradoxically, the tremendous proliferation
in military spending and ventures that the U.S. has carried out
since WWII has made us less safe than ever by creating anti-U.S.
hatred that manifests itself from time to time in the form of
random acts of violence. If one were to look closely at the
past 58 years, one would be hard pressed to find a single U.S.
military or C.I.A. intervention that has brought us one iota
of safety, or, for that matter, that has actually been done for
national defense purposes. As Butler illustrated in 1933, and
it is even truer now than then, the U.S. engages in interventions
meant to protect the interests of the powerful and wealthy of
our nation and our allies, and rarely, if ever, in order to actually
protect its citizens.
For some reason, many who have little
understanding of our foreign policy history prefer to point to
the three instances in our nation's history when the military
was used for defending the people: the War of 1812, WWI,
and WWII. Moreover, while one can certainly find fault with
aspects of our involvement in those three wars, nonetheless,
every other one had nothing to do with national security, and
everything to do with profits and power. While we draped our
foreign policy in the cloak of beneficence in order to fight
the Cold War, we instead killed over six million union leaders,
peasants, teachers, priests, and resistance fighters in the developing
world. We were not fighting the Soviets and the Chinese on their
soil; we were busy setting the developing world back a century
in their development.
In the early 1980s, with the Cold War
still on, we began in force the wars on terrorism and drugs,
neither of which has brought us any closer to the proclaimed
goals over twenty years later. Instead, the prison industry
has inflated to the point that it has become incredibly profitable
to corporations, and we have lost billions to national law enforcement
efforts and military aid to Latin American and other nations,
who repress and imprison their own citizens as they did during
the Cold War. Corporations have profited from all of these wars,
and they in turn support politicians and own the media, both
of which present these wars as necessary measures for protecting
freedom. The mutual support between the rich and the politicians
(the power elite) has always dictated this nation's political
process, and as long as there is profit to be made from destruction
and suffering, especially of those who are not reaping the profits
thereof, war will be facilitated and promoted.
In 1933, Butler lamented how as a Marine
officer, he assisted Wall Street in their efforts to extend their
empires into the Caribbean Basin and other places in the developing
world. His opening statement follows:
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 international is scope. It is the only one in which
the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is
not what is seems to the majority of the people. Only a small
'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the
benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out
of war a few people make huge fortunes.
My mission as a Marine veteran is to continue Smedley Butler's
(as well as all other veteran dissidents) legacy of exposing
the truth about the purpose of military.
According to Butler, World War I cost
the U.S. 52 billion dollars, giving 16 billion in profits to
private corporations. He illustrated the significance of this
by comparing the profits of several large companies before and
during the war. According to Butler, Du Pont (who produced powder)
went from 6 million to 58 million in annual profits, Bethlehem
Steel went from 6 million to 49 million, U.S. Steel went from
105 million to 240 million, Anaconda's copper production (ammunition
casings) helped the company to go from 10 million to 34 million,
and Utah Copper went from 5 million to 21 million in annual profits
during the war. The Great War cost each American 400 dollars
and these companies benefited from the deaths of over 130,000
U.S. soldiers and countless Europeans.
Other sectors profited enormously from
the War. From leather companies to chemicals, to nickel, to
sugar refining, to banks, to coal, to shoes, to field gear, to
tools, to ship builders, to airplane and auto engine manufacturers,
companies had profits ranging from 30 to 300 percent. The leftover
waste was also a point of contention with Butler (and this is
certainly worse today), as he explained that millions of pieces
of equipment never made it to the soldiers, and were in fact
never used due to regulation adjustments and extreme overproduction.
Moreover, while this racket was immense back in Butler's day,
it was quite paltry when compared with that of today.
According to sources cited by Joel Andreas,
in his excellent book, Addicted to War, between 1948 and
2002, the U.S. spent more than 15 trillion dollars on its military.
The military budget for 2002 was 346.5 billion dollars, and
when the budgets for the pentagon, the Energy Department's nuclear
costs, NASA's military portion, foreign military aid, veterans'
benefits, and the interest paid for our military debt, the total
reaches 670 billion dollars. In comparison to the amount spent
per American during WWI (400), we each give 4,000 dollars annually
to cover a military budget that could not even protect us from
nineteen box-cutter wielding airline passengers. For that amount,
we could each afford to save up for an electric car, so that
we could reduce our dependence on oil, which largely dictates
our military presence in the Gulf in the first place.
Meanwhile, high school students are made
to peddle corporate products in order to fill in the gaps left
behind by the drain that is the military budget and other counterproductive
federal expenditures. While the military receives 50.5 percent
of federal tax money, education receives 8 percent. During his
campaign, George W. Bush claimed that his number one priority
would be education, just like the proclaimed priority of most
other politicians. Meanwhile, high school students can be suspended
for wearing Pepsi shirts on Coke day (which happened in a Colorado
high school), and teachers must designate fifteen minutes of
class time each day for the commercial-rich Channel One, as many
schools are obligated to these types of corporations for their
supplies.
The amount of companies that benefit
from this militaristic system makes Butler's analysis pale by
comparison. Over 100,000 companies depend on the pentagon for
their profits each year, which means that many people depend
on "national defense" for their livelihoods. These
people, especially the leaders of the corporations, are what
the peace movement is largely up against in its fight to end
our nation's permanent war footing. Companies such as Lockheed
Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Raytheon,
and thousands of others, rake in billions each year, which means
that they will not give up the business of war without a fight.
Therefore, ending war does not only mean struggling for peace
in general, it means challenging the ways in which the currently-powerful
corporations make money. Moreover, because corporations who
benefit from war also support political candidates, the candidates
have every reason to defend those corporate interests who depend
on war making, and the politicians have very little reason to
defend the nation's interests as a whole.
Therefore, it is pointless to argue how
we can make education a higher priority for our country without
understanding this system. It is in the best interest of the
power elite on Wall Street and in Washington that we remain undereducated
with respect to our nation's use of force in world affairs, and
that the education we receive directs us toward supporting the
power elite while deterring us away from learning the truth about
the functioning of the militaristic system. I believe that we
do live a semi-democratic society, but because we as a whole
are so fundamentally blinded to the criminality of our elected
leaders and their wealthy supporters, we live in a "plutocracy,"
to borrow Ramsey Clark's description.
So, how does the government get away
with the hypocrisy? As long as people are in the dark about
the atrocities our nation commits, one will find the media's
complicity to be almost total. I find a couple of simple examples
helpful for illustrating this. First, in all of my public and
private talks with people, ranging from high school age to history
graduate students, only one person (a high school senior) could
identify the significance of one of these dates: 09/11/1973 and
12/07/1975. Most Americans surely recognize 09/11/2001 and 12/07/1941,
as these were the days "that will live in infamy",
because they led the U.S. into expanding the global War on Terror
and World War II. Yet, for some reason, all but one of the hundreds
of people I have asked to identify the former dates has heard
of them.
These dates (09/11/1973 and 12/07/1975),
are quite important to the people who still suffer their consequences.
Take the Chileans, who lost at least 3,000 people because of
a military coup that the U.S. supported on September 11, 1973,
or the East Timorese, who lost 200,000 people (1/3 of the population)
after we assisted Indonesia in their destruction of that nation
beginning with the invasion of the small island on December 7,
1975. Of course, Chile's population was only 10-12 million at
the time, and in comparison to our loss of 3,000 people on 09/11/2001,
it would be like losing 80-90,000 U.S. citizens. The Chileans
had no such recourse against us for aiding General Augusto Pinochet
in his torture and murder of thousands of his people, which we
supported. Nor have the East Timorese, or the dozens of other
poor nations we have assisted in the repression and/or destruction
of, been given the right to retaliate against us. Government
documents detailing the U.S. involvement in the Chilean coup
and the genocide of East Timor are provided in full text on the
National Security Archive's website, supported by George Washington
University: http://www.hfni.gsehd.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.
Even though there is overwhelming proof
of what we did to Chile and East Timor (not to mention the dozens
of other nations we have intervened in) why do we not know about
their dates of infamy, each of which our government had
an enormous role in? Does our lack of knowledge about these
dates mean anything? The fact that the public knows little of
them demonstrates that we are doomed to repeat history. I am
disappointed that we are collectively blind to these dates precisely
because the dates in which atrocities were perpetrated against
us are days "that will live in infamy", which
the media and government have and will forever use as rallying
cries to promote the nationalism that will ultimately lead to
more deaths in the developing world, as well as on our own soil.
Moreover, the atrocities in East Timor and Chile are but a drop
in the bucket in comparison to the perhaps 8 million others we
have helped kill over the past fifty seven years in the name
of national security. The question is, if we are oblivious to
the horrible atrocities our government has committed on such
America-significant days of "infamy", how will we prevent
our government from committing such atrocities in the future?
How will we prevent the continuation of the "racket"
so notorious in Smedley Butler's and our time, which will inevitably
come back to bite us again?
Chris White
is an ex-Marine infantryman who is currently working on his doctorate
in history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He served
from 1994-98, in Diego Garcia, Camp Pendleton, CA, Okinawa, Japan,
and Doha, Qatar. He is also a member of Veterans for Peace.
He can be reached at: juliopac@swbell.net
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