The war racket and its subsidiaries

" ... War is such a good racket that the Racketeers have no plans to stop it anytime soon: as one major wrote in the journal of the Army War College,

"We have entered an age of constant conflict.... There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe..... The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing." As the bombs started falling on Afghanistan, Vice-President Cheney said that the "War on Terrorism" "may never end. At least, not in out lifetime." More than a year later, on an aircraft carrier returning to San Diego after helping "liberate" Iraq, President Bush said, "The war on terror is not over."

War has been such a swell racket that it has spawned several subsidiaries: the Oil Racket, the Drug Racket, the Terrorism Racket, and the hybrid War-On-Drugs and War-On-Terrorism Rackets.

The Oil Racket began when the Allies broke the World War I stalemate of trench warfare with tanks, gasoline-driven transport, and air power. The oil-burning British Fleet out-maneuvered the coal-burning German Fleet in the North Sea. It was clear that to stand a chance in the War Racket you had to be a player in the Oil Racket. The powers began jockeying for all the oil they could control, mostly in the Middle East. A long series of coups, wars, and other crises ensued as different Racketeers fought over the juice that drove their economies, and more important, their war machines. Of course, the banks and weapons companies cashed in on all this action. During World War II the King of Saudi Arabia was an ardent supporter of Hitler but took protection money from Roosevelt to keep US oil rigs -- and their oil -- from the Axis. After the war, Roosevelt met the King and cut a secret deal trading US protection of the Saud dynasty's throne for privileged access to its oil. (The "fundamentalist Muslims" so important for the Terrorism Racket take their inspiration from a right-wing sect allied with this dynasty.)

Two main features of the Oil Racket since the latter Twentieth Century are that most or all oil producers have demanded US dollars in payment (helping US banks and importers), and that oil-rich governments (especially Saudi Arabia's) quietly kicked much of the loot back to the US Treasury (in loans) and weapons companies (in purchases). They also kept most of their leftover money in US banks (this is how Citigroup et al. got their hands on the Iraqi money the elder President Bush froze in 1990). The Oil Racket is so blatantly obvious that an advisor to Tony Blair admitted that the US and UK took over Iraq for its oil. Cashing in on rising demand (to fuel the war machine) and rising prices (as the military demand bid them up), ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell posted record profits for the quarter -- double or triple the previous quarter.

The Drug Racket -- at least in its modern, globalized form -- began in the late 1940s when the CIA enlisted the Sicilian Mafia and Corsican gangsters to fight leftists in Italy and France; in return, it allowed them to rebuild their heroin network (it turned the Corsican operation over to French intelligence in the mid-1950s). Later, as US Racketeers took Southeast Asia over from French Racketeers, they inherited their opium smuggling networks and built them into a heroin ring which financed a covert proxy war against Communist China. In the mid-1980s, US "clandestine services" took over the South American cocaine trade to finance their proxy war in Nicaragua (and later in Colombia) and grew it into such a big racket that the central banks of Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru can't repay their dollar-denominated loans to US banks without the drug money. (The CIA actually admitted that it protected its allies' drug running in Central America.) At about the same time they did the same thing with Afghanistan's opium, and now Pakistan's central bank is thoroughly hooked on heroin dollars. And so on. Such countries are war-torn and, due to years of the World Bank's "structural adjustment policies," many have so much of their land devoted to export crops that they can't grow their own food -- so without foreign currency, the people starve. This, along with their covert armies, is how the really big Racketeers buy and sell governments.

The Terrorism Racket hit the big time after US, Saudi, and Pakistani Racketeers decided to make trouble for the Soviets in Afghanistan. They started giving secret aid to enemies of the socialist Afghan government, and the Soviets invaded, beginning a long and bloody war which hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the process they built up the Afghan Drug Racket until it supplied about two-thirds of the world's heroin. They set up Islamic "religious schools" teaching an extremist doctrine similar to that of the sect allied with the Saudi monarchy and gave their "best" students weapons training. Osama bin Laden was a top recruiter for this project, rounding up footloose young men in the Middle East and sending them to the US for special training before they went to Afghanistan.

After the fall of the Soviet Union leading US and Saudi Racketeers met with others several times to decide what to do with the Mujahedin and their gun and drug rings. While the more cautious ones wanted to disband them, others refused to give up such useful arrangements. As a former CIA analyst explained, the same policies that helped bring down the Soviet Union are still useful to curb residual Russian and emerging Chinese influence in Central Asia. But they are useful elsewhere as well: various Mujahedin groups resettled in places like Chechnya, the Philippines, and Sudan. Al Qaeda, in concert with US and British forces, helped train Bosnian Muslims and the KLA, moving heroin to pay the bills. Although the Saudi government has officially expelled Osama bin Laden, and his family has officially disowned him, there are persistent reports that Prince Turki, long head of Saudi intelligence and now Ambassador to the US, remains in close contact with him. Further, the royal family continues to support his businesses, and his own family manages to stay in touch surreptitiously. The French newspaper Le Figaro reported that a high-level CIA officer, as well as many of Osama's relatives, visited him while he was having his kidneys treated at the US hospital in Dubai in July 2001. As late as 1997 the US National Security Agency was bragging of intercepting his phone calls to his mother. His brothers still run banks and other companies connected with terrorists, and al Qaeda troops protect Western oil pipelines in war-torn areas.

Terrorist attacks against the US can be helpful to US Racketeers: a former bioweapons director observed that the 2001 anthrax attacks weren't all bad, since they led to a $6 billion increase in the biowarfare budget. The anthrax strain originally came from a US military laboratory, and only such laboratories know how to make it as fine and fluffy as the anthrax in the mailings.

The War Racket and the Drug Racket combine to form the War-on-Drugs Racket, by which the Racketeers get more military and police power by pinning their own drug racket on their enemy du jour. There are many examples: Reagan brandished pictures of "Sandinista narco-traffickers" which actually showed Medellin Cartel members who had (until then) been protected by the CIA since their profits benefited the Contras. Even though the DEA didn't buy the "Sandinista" story, it led to a secret Presidential National Security Decision Directive authorizing increased military and intelligence forces to fight the "Drug War." More recently, the Clinton and Bush Administrations have been doing the same thing with the FARC in Colombia, branding it a "narco-guerrilla" army and increasing "counternarcotics" aid to the Colombian military. According to the Colombian government, the FARC does control about 2.5 percent of Colombia's cocaine exports; right-wing paramilitary groups, in close alliance with the army which is getting the "counternarcotics" aid, control about 40 percent. Of course, the "War on Drugs" serves to increase police powers in the US, too.

The latest model is the War-on-Terrorism Racket, unveiled after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It has major advantages: it promises to be endless, the "enemy" can be just about anywhere, and it has proved even better than the War-on-Drugs Racket for increasing US police powers. So far it has "justified" major military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, more US troops and "advisors" from Uzbekistan to the Philippines, the "PATRIOT" Act (with a sequel in the works at this writing), and the Department of "Homeland Security."

But most people don't want war, so the Racketeers often have to stir it up. In 1939 German officers dressed an unknown prisoner up in a Polish Army uniform, staged a Polish attack on a German radio station, and invaded Poland the next day. In 1931 Japanese soldiers bombed the South Manchurian Railway (which Japan controlled), blamed China for the attack, and promptly invaded. Ten years later the US Government cut off Japan's oil supplies, steel, and credit while leaving the Pacific Fleet exposed in Hawaii. As expected, Japan responded by going to war with the US. They kicked it off with a "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbor, but Naval Intelligence had broken Japan's military codes and tracked Japanese warships all the way there. The Washington brass hobbled the Pacific Fleet commander's reconnaissance efforts, didn't tell him of the attack force bearing down on him, and told him to prepare for propaganda and sabotage, not an air attack. (This is not to say that the Roosevelt Administration was running this racket; other players may have forced his hand. FDR knew that Hitler was planning to attack the US when he had bombers with enough range. He had troubles at home too: US Nazi supporters planned a military coup against FDR and approached General Butler to spearhead it, but he blew the whistle and the plan fizzled.) The Tonkin Gulf "incident" (which followed a series of covert US-led commando raids into North Vietnam) also comes to mind. It is a well-established technique. As Hermann Goering put it, "Naturally, the common people don't want war. . . . [But] it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Many signs suggest that the September 11 attacks were no exception to this pattern.

In recent years leading US Racketeers have fretted that the people of the US don't understand their "global responsibilities," which boil down to making sure that they (US Racketeers and their allies) run the world. Without US "primacy," they say, the world must sink into anarchy and economic depression. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisor and still a professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in 1997 that to save the world from this fate the US must control Eurasia, and to do that it must control Central Asia. He noted, however, that the US only rose to the challenge of ending World War II after the shock of Pearl Harbor. The Project for the New American Century, whose statement of principle boasts the signatures of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, Steve Forbes, William Bennett, Paul Wolfowitz, and other luminaries of the US right, echoed Brezinski's lament that the US people lack the resolve to Keep the World Safe for Democracy. The Project called for a return to the Reagan years of high "defense" spending to support US "constabulary" actions all over the world. Its monograph Rebuilding America's Defenses admitted that the "transformation" it so earnestly sought would be very slow indeed without something equivalent to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Clinton Administration drew up plans for a war on al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but didn't get them finished until he was on his way out, so he handed them over to Bush's people. They rewrote the plans for a much larger war, and these modified plans hit Bush's desk in early September 2001. Meanwhile (in July), retired US diplomats told their Russian and Pakistani counterparts in informal meetings that the US was considering the "military option" in Afghanistan and that bombs might be falling by the middle of that October (they were pretty close: it turned out to be October 7). ... "

From: 'War is Still a Racket' by Ed Rippy