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 in 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 it 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.
-Smedley Butler, War is a Racket, 1935
Inevitably, an abundance of worthy and poignant retrospectives have accompanied the 10 year anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks, offering reflection on their consequences and meanings to people all over the world, and speculating on how the trends set in motion – like the US-sponsored War on Terror (understood here to include the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as covert operations around the globe) – will play out going forward. The reach of 9/11 is enormous, of course, and justifies assessment across many dimensions. But surely one of the most important avenues for analysis concerns the influence of 9/11 on the governmental system of the United States, the world hegemon that suffered the blows of that day, and has spent the decade since cultivating an obsession about preventing similar episodes in the future.
There is no denying that the domestic policies of the United States have become more right wing in the ten years since 9/11. The shrinking of civil liberties (the suppression of voter rights, the deportation of illegal aliens, warrantless wiretaps, etc. (1)) and official facilitation of corporate interests at the expense of the public have been all too palpable over the last decade.Couple these trends to official complacency regarding climate change, the assault on public-worker trade unions, and the rejection of Keynesian economic stimulus, and you get a system losing touch with its past. The huge baby boomer generation grew up in a country with starkly different policies, values, and prospects. This process commenced long before 9/11, of course. The political evolution of the US last ten years looks very much like an acceleration of a preexisting trajectory, which President Reagan made so noticeable in the 1980s.
By no means, however, should we dismiss the significance of 9/11 to the governmental system of the US. For, on the heels of 9/11, the Bush administration explicitly declared the country to be at war. As the US has learned before, war can sharply transform political life, and it is doing so now. Moreover, as we shall see, the fact that war on terror is understood to be a conflict without any foreseeable conclusion carries its own political consequences.
I think bin Laden gave Bush a huge present.
– Juan Cobo (senior correspondent for Izvestiia, among other venues, in private conversation, 2002)
The US might well have found itself at war in the Middle East even without 9/11. As Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Secretary of the Treasury revealed, President Bush had prioritized removing Saddam Hussein as soon as his first term began, nine months before the attacks. (2) In any case, 9/11 allowed the Bush administration to set the enormous US military machine in motion.Of course the pursuit of war can include the pursuit of power at home, not just on the battlefield, and both the Bush and Obama administrations have exploited the war on terror as cover for appropriating more power for the executive branch. To take one glaring example, the physical buildout and delegation of authority to the newly minted Department of Homeland Security DHS over the last ten years has been nothing short of spectacular. At last count 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies under the DHS umbrella were involved in counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence programs, spread out in approximately 10,000 locations within the US, and harboring an estimated 854,000 employees with top-secret security clearances. (3)
The Presidents' accumulation of power at the expense of Congress and the judiciary is part of what Juan Cobo had in mind in declaring 9/11 a gift to Bush. But it is not all. The war on terror has also proven a fantastic vehicle for transferring wealth to a narrow corporate elite.The financial stakes are huge, of course. Direct funding for combat and intelligence operations has run to $1.69 trillion, cumulatively, and the wars have served as an excuse to inflate the defense budget by 44 percent (adjusted for inflation) over the last decade…The base defense budget totals $5.9 trillion for that time period. Homeland Defense spending has reached $636 billion for the decade. (4) From these enormous pools of cash the government has showered contracts on private corporations, such that contractors total 69 percent of the Department of Defense's workforce; 70 percent of all intelligence budgets are outsourced. (5)
And of course the war has proven to be fertile ground for corruption in high places…
The Corruptagon?
War profiteering and government corruption in wartime are not new phenomena. America has its own past in this regard, best known with respect to the First World War, thanks to General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket. But, as with so many social pathologies, the US took effective steps to control war profiteering during the period of the New Deal. (most famously through the US Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, popularly known as the Truman Committee, from 1941-48) Alas, these safeguards have not stood up to determined assault from the now mature corporate-controlled state.
Waste at the Pentagon has long been a matter of record. In 2001, for instance, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously admitted that the Pentagon could not track up to $2.3 trillion in transactions over many previous years. Affairs did not improve once the war on terror got rolling. In 2005 both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Office of Management and Budget identified the Pentagon as particularly lax in managing its money. (6) Evidence to that effect surfaces periodically. Thus, a GAO assessment released in 2009 found research cost overruns totaling nearly $300 billion for 96 ongoing weapons programs. The overruns were running at 42 percent in 2008, as compared to just 27 percent in 2000. (7) If this sort of evidence is not damning enough by itself, consider the fact that the “revolving door” taking Pentagon officials to lucrative careers with private contractors has almost doubled in volume since the 1990s, and is now commonplace, per research from Boston Globe reporter Brian Bender. (8)
Despite all the ominous signs however, over the last few years the Pentagon has sharply reduced audits of its contracts with equipment and service providers. And they will reduce audits much further going forward, leaving the door open to rampant abuse, in the form of overpricing-plus-kickback schemes. (9) New data from watchdog groups confirm just how much more dangerous this is getting. The Pentagon approved $140 billion worth of non-competitive contracts in 2010, up from $50 billion in 2001. Over the first half of this year the dollar value of competitively sourced contracts was just 55 percent, the lowest since the turn of the century, and far below other federal agencies. (10)
These trends are surely attributable to the war, which gives officials a ready excuse to dispense with a fair, competitive process (on grounds of asserted urgency, etc.). Much of the waste is simple inefficiency, but fraud is also involved, say the government's own watchdogs(the General Accounting Office, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, and others). The Obama administration and the Department of Defense have issued memos promising cleanup, but no progress is evident. Better reflection of official attitudes to this ongoing disgrace are, on the one hand, the Obama administrations crackdowns on whistleblowers inside the government (11), and, on the other hand, the Department of Defense's open indifference to its legal obligation to submit to financial audits (merely from its own Inspector General office) on an annual basis. The Department has never puts its books in order for an audit, and in 2006 they pushed the date out to 2016, at the earliest! (12)
Extending War, Deferring Accountability
The cloud of lawlessness overhanging the war on terror can be understood as a sign of the times in America, where corporate and administrative elites have been running roughshod over national interests with increasing brazenness in recent decades. But 9/11 must be part of the explanation for the lawless atmosphere, because it opened the door to pursuit of a war on terror that could continue without end. A state of endless, low-grade warfare is more than just a psychological burden on the country.It also brings its own pathologies to the halls of power. As Glenn Greenwald recently elaborated, a sense of endless war breeds a culture of unrestrained power in the upper reaches of the military, the intelligence services, and the White House. The authorities lose their awareness of an eventual day of reckoning, when they would have to account for their actions. They feel more above the law now than ever before, and this breeds an arrogance that corrodes morality, encourages recklessness, and endangers the nation and the world. (13)
In these conditions, meaningful reforms are unlikely, to say the least. And indeed, last month, just days after the White House and Congress tentatively resolved a self-destructive conflict over the nation's debt ceiling, President Obama publicly endorsed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's appeal to protect defense budget from austerity planning. Obama is prioritizing demonstrable wasteful defense spending over pressing social welfare needs, in other words. (14)
And so the boondoggle that is the war on terror will continue. Indeed, there is no guarantee that it will not escalate, in the form either of more corruption, or more aggression. An overview of CIA leadership from agency veteran Ray McGovern is of particularly instructive this respect. (15) McGovern demonstrates that a culture of self-interested, right wing careerism has maintained its grip on the CIA, notwithstanding the exposure or grievous failings over the last decade. The international community can draw no comfort from this.
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(1) On the sad state of civil liberties, for instance, see the ACLU's review of the past ten years: A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11, released September 7th, 2011.
(2) Julian Borger, “Bush Decided to remove Saddam “on day one'”, The Guardian, January 12th, 2004.
(3) Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “Top Secret America: A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control”, WashingtonPost, July 19th, 2010.
(4) Figures for war outlays and defense budgets from Chris Hellman, “How Safe are You? What Almost $8 Trillion in Security Spending Bought You,” TomDispatch.com, August 16th, 2011. The eventual cost of the wars will exceed the budget outlays, of course, because of follow-on costs, including interest payments and veterans' care. A sober estimate from a team at Brown University estimates the wars alone (not including base defense spending) will cost about $4 trillion. “Ten Years On,” The Economist, September 3rd, 2011, p. 11.
(5) Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class, Nation Books 2010, pp. 42.
(6) Winslow T. Wheeler & Lawrence J. Korb, Military Reform: A Reference Handbook, Praeger, 2007, p.75.
(7) Ellen Nakashima and Dana Hedgpeth, “Arms Programs Way Over Budget, GAP Report Finds,” WashingtonPost, March 31st, 2009.
(8) Brian Bender “From the Pentagon to the Private Sector”, BostonGlobe, December 26th, 2010.
(9) “Pentagon Reducing Oversight of Contracts Worth Tens of Billions”, Project on Government Oversight, October 29th, 2010.
(10) Sharon Weinberger, “Windfalls of War: Pentagon's No-Bid Contracts Triple in Years of War,” iWatchNews.org, August 29th, 2011.
(11) See, e.g., Glenn Greenwald, “The Motive Behind Whistleblower Prosecutions”, Salon.com, July 14th, 2010; and Government Accountability Project, “Seventh Circuit Court Rules Rumsfeld Can be Held Liable for Torture of U.S. Citizens in War Zones,” August 8th, 2011.
(12) Scott J. Paltrow, “The Pentagon's $1 Trillion Problem,” Portfolio.com, April 14th, 2008; and Amanda Terkel, “Tom Coburn to Pentagon: get Finances in Order or Face Deep Cuts,” HuffingtonPost.com, February 1st, 2011.
(13) Glenn Greenwald, “Endless War and the Culture of Unrestrained Power,” Salon.com, September 6th, 2011.
(14) Brian Beutler, “Obama Sides With Panetta on Need to Cut Medicare Over Defense”, TalkingPointsMemo.com, August 9th, 2011.
(15) Ray McGovern, “The Rise of Another CIA Yes Man,” CommonDreams.org, August 29th, 2011.
