The highly decorated war hero, Major General Smedley Butler, described a well-hidden secret in his classic book, War is a Racket: “I made Mexico safe for American oil in 1914 … I helped in the raping of a half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street … In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.” Butler came to see himself as a gangster, a muscle-man for the protection of business interests. History textbooks fail to mention what Butler saw as the main cause of the First World War: the more than 20,000 millionaires and billionaires created by war profiteering.
Butler writes that a “racket” is a deception: war is not what it appears to be to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows the truth, and makes huge fortunes from war while the masses sacrifice their lives for fabricated causes. A recent article in Foreign Policy re-iterated the message that “War is still a racket” by showing how some groups are making trillions in profits from the perpetual war against terror.
As plans for war against Syria heat up, new myths are being manufactured to support it. In line with Butler’s thesis, we must look past the smokescreens of the Islamic State (IS) and oppression of Syrians, and follow the money, to understand the reasons for the war. In 2009, Qatar proposed to build a pipeline through Jordan and Turkey to supply oil to Europe. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad turned this down, and instead signed his own death warrant by signing an agreement for an alternative pipeline which would run through Iran, Iraq and Syria. Oil interests opposed to this deal began funding rebel groups to overthrow Assad, to block this possibility. Sympathy for oppressed Syrians has nothing to do with the realpolitik of financing the war against Assad. In fact, the IS came into existence after a coalition of countries headed by the US began to provide arms and money to create a rebellion against Assad.
Exactly parallel to the IS, the origins of the Taliban lie in the massive funding and arms provided by the CIA to local Muslims to engage in jihad against Russia in Afghanistan. But we must dig deeper to find the profit motives behind the Afghan war. The story of the competition between US oil company Unocal and the Argentinian oil Company Bridas for building the oil pipeline through Afghanistan is too complex to describe here. Suffice it to say that when the Taliban became an obstacle to the planned Unocal pipeline, they were removed from the scene. Another major sin of the Taliban was to shut down opium production, which reduced world supply of heroin by more than 50 per cent, and led to multibillion dollar losses to the shadowy global narcotics industry, second only to the world oil industry.
In 1967, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa. By the time he was assassinated, he had transformed Libya into one of Africa’s richest nation. Prior to the US-led bombing campaign in 2011, Libya had the highest Human Development Index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all of Africa. The country provided effective free health and education services to all citizens. Then Gaddafi committed an unpardonable crime: he announced plans to nationalise Libyan oil, depriving Western oil conglomerates of profits. He was duly punished for this audacity. Following a familiar pattern, rebels were armed and funded to create a rebellion against Gaddafi. The US-EU-Nato bombing blitz of 2011 destroyed hospitals, schools, energy and water infrastructure. As a result, a once prosperous country has been reduced to rubble, while Nato forces proudly proclaimed their success in defending democracy, and in creating a ‘historic victory’ for the people of Libya against an evil dictator.
Similarly, Iraq was one of the most advanced economies of this region. Saddam Hussein did not learn the lessons from history, and angered big oil by attempting to pursue independent policies for Iraqi oil. In line with Butler’s thesis, false pretexts of WMDs were manufactured to cover the real reasons for the Iraq war. Many senior officials confirmed what Alan Greenspan said: “It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” The regime change operation, mounted for the “benefit of the Iraqi people” has resulted in complete chaos. Massive destruction of infrastructure has returned Iraq to the Stone Age, killing a million and destroying the power, water, hospitals, schools and other infrastructure to make the lives of the remaining 40 million citizens a living hell.
Current war budgets are sufficient to amply provide for basic needs of food, health, housing and education for all people on the planet. Thus learning to live together in peace has huge potential payoffs for humanity as a whole. However, the route to world peace suggested by General Smedley Butler’s analysis is very different from what prevailing myths about the sources of violence would have us believe. The power of big business and the military-industrial complex to control government policy is clearly revealed in the failure of Barack Obama to keep many campaign promises which went against their interests. For instance, Obama promised to eliminate tax loopholes for oil and gas companies, but did not have any success in his attempts to this end. The powerful pharmaceutical industry also blocked his promised proposal to allow imports of medicine to compete with expensive domestic brands. Butler said that to end war, we must end the possibility of profiteering from war. Of his many creative proposals to this end, one is creating a global consensus that armies should only fight defensive wars, on their own territories. Butler’s message remains ignored and unheard, even though it is of central importance to understanding how we can end wars and create global prosperity today.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 4th, 2016. More Material on War Profiteering. Author Page on LinkedIn. My Collected Works, organized by subject
shortlink for this post: https://bit.do/azbow
WEA Pedagogy Blog 
Completely agree.
“Oil interests opposed to this deal (alternative pipeline)) began funding rebel groups to overthrow Assad, to block this possibility.” Can we see something like this happening in Canada – not necessarily about oil – but water? Or how about the proposal to use the Bank of Canada to finance public infrastructure, by-passing private banks and their ability to control money creation and the riches gained there from. Those controlling money creation might see such actions in Canada as a precedent setter and use whatever means necessary to show other nations that such policies are not acceptable (to them). Should that happen would other Canadians (especially economists and lawyers) stand firm against those trying to change Canadian policy?
yep. we already know US generals and admirals as cowards only willing to invade neighborhoods of lightly armed innocent people. How do we get the word out?
The “core” of this post are lies fabricated at industrial scale at the kremlin. They’re designed to look plausible for people that don’t know history and context. If you’ve a week of free time you can look up the context of each and every of these facts and verify that their correct interpretation is more or less the opposite of the one recommended by this article. I’ll correct a few lies here and there without even attempting to refute all of them. First of all, NATO is a defensive alliance and was not involved in the anti-gaddafi operation. NATO is what has saved western europe from stalinism for the past 50 years. Military spending in most NATO nations has collapsed to such low levels that there is right now a significant risk of invasion of europe from putin’s regime. In non-NATO european country Ukraine it’s already happening. Putin’s regime has already restarted (and improved) cold war disinformation and zombification machine that is preparation for such a war. “Current war budgets” in europe are not sufficient to deter that. Second, the so called “western” anti-gaddafi operation was started by France, not USA. Most NATO members didn’t partecipate at all. USA gave a few bombs to France. There was already a brutal civil war going on there. I’ll not go into the causes of that civil war, except by saying that oil profits have always been nationalized there (like in almost every oil rich country except for the anglo countries) and were obviously planned to stay that way. Gaddafi changed nothing on that. Third, Libian government had leased oil extraction mainly to italian companies, and italy has tried hard to avoid war there. If there is a grain of truth there, it is that france has “stolen” the leases from italy. Anyway even this is mostly false. Fourth, the sirian civil war has pretty much nothing to do with oil pipes. Pipes are only marginally cheaper than LNG, and there is absolutely no point in trying to start a war for a pipe. That is complete bullshit. I could go on but i stop there. I hope readers here get the picture.
Amazing — read Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya on 2011 Military Intervention in Libya for details of NATO involvement in the bombardment of Libya. Watch Ben Swann for details about Syria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnNBbm1YQyg. What can justify carpet bombing of any country, destroying lives and livelihoods of all the citizens, all energy, water, basic infrastructure?? The vast amount of death and destruction in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan due to foreign bombing is not even denied by the perpetrators of these atrocities. ALL of the claims made in the article are based on sources which have been linked, and are more or less facts accepted by all parties.
Reblogged this on An Islamic WorldView.