America’s Ship of State
On August 4, 1785, Alexander Hamilton referred to politicians and bureaucrats as “greedy dogs who can never have enough!” Nothing has changed since.
In the 1800s President Lincoln said “Allow the President to invade a nation whenever he shall deem it necessary and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade xyz to prevent xyz from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, “I see no probability of xyz from invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent, I see it, if you don’t.”
In 1935, retired Marine Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler stated in his speech and subsequent book War Is a Racket that national “security” policy was being dictated by businesses intent on profiteering from war. General Butler testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had been approached by a cabal of industrialists to lead a coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The congressional committee decided the accused were “too big to fail.”
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom warned of the danger of a monopolistic organization of industry leaders from WW II: “Another element which after this war is likely to strengthen the tendencies in this direction will be some of the men who during the war have tasted the powers of coercive control and will find it difficult to reconcile themselves with the humbler roles they will then have to play [in peaceful times].”
In 1956, sociologist C. Write Mills in his book The Power Elite said that a class of military, business, and political leaders, driven by mutual interests, were the real leaders of the nation, and were effectively beyond democratic control.
In his farewell address on January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower warned America of the growing Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC): “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex.” The original phrase was the military-industrial-congressional–complex but congressional was deleted in response to pressure by elected officials. As an aside, Thomas Alva Edison’s first patent was to have been an electric vote counting machine – but “maneuver-minded” politicians put the kabosh on that patent.
In 1983 Charles Higham obtained recently declassified government documents exposing by name those industrialists who supported Hitler’s rise to power from the early 1930’s financing his arms buildup and enabling him to conduct the war against America and its’ allies throughout World War II. For example, Standard Oil (changed its name to Exxon in 1972) smuggled the key ingredient for aviation fuel to Germany allowing the Nazis to conduct the blitzkrieg of Western Europe and the Blitz of London. (Trading with the Enemy: An Expose’ of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949)
On July 22, 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report concluded that the terrorist attacks were enabled by the airline industry (especially Delta, United and American) asking the State Department to pressure the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) to stop refusing admission to foreign “students” who had left the country and were reentering the country out of status – and disappearing into the United States. INS adopted the policy literally: “Don’t F#*k with the 7As” and immigration inspectors who did were counseled in writing.
So it should be no surprise that in 2005, Bush, Jr. told Nestor Kuchner, former President of Argentina at the Summit of the Americas in Mar de Plata “The best way to revitalize an economy is war. The United States had grown stronger with war”. Those were his exact words.” It appears Americans fail to see the gross Goebbels-esque lie in that statement because the American electorate tolerated two financially and morally bankrupt wars for twenty years.
Should we have punished the perpetrators of 9/11? Yes. Absolutely. But, as Tsun Tsu said “You don’t use a sledgehammer to kill a fly on your forehead.” The Israelis redeemed the Munich victims without invading another country and bankrupting theirs. We could do the same if our politicians “only had a brain.” If we really wanted to punish everyone responsible for 9/11 we would have bombed Saudi Arabia and sent several American politicians and State Department bureaucrats to prison. Bush, Jr.’s response was the nearly the same as the Clintons’ “Don’t waste a good crisis when there is money to be made.” Bush, Jr. actually said “What’s the use of having a military if we don’t use it?” -confirming we had a juvenile delinquent playing with his toys as our president. Conservatives complain of the Clintons’ corruption and Benghazi fiasco going unpunished. Yet Bush, Jr.’s idiocracy in starting those wars is merely on par with Biden’s failure to execute a withdrawal. They belong in the same asylum for the criminally insane.
Remember playing “Crack the Whip” on school playgrounds back in the day? It was a youthful frolic in physics that would horrify the Socialist Snowflake educators of today. Kids would line up holding hands and the first in line would start running – slowly at first increasing speed and swerving as the line of kids tried to keep up. The last in line – the “tail” of the whip- would be flung off his feet with the exponentially increased momentum of the human chain. It was a great challenge in teamwork and strength to see who could hold on the longest.
Joe Biden is simply (very literally) the tail of the political whip. Bush, Jr. – the Yale cheerleader- is the head of the whip. It was Jr. who started both doomed – at- the- start wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was Jr. who, after Special Forces had put the Taliban on the run, let General Franks get in on the medal chasing and invaded Afghanistan en masse only to divert critically needed resources to Iraq in a grossly mismanaged State Department war there as well (see: Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran). The disastrous outcomes were as determined the day the first U.S. troops set foot on Muslim soil as when the first Marines landed at Danang. So the shock and very brief outrage about the plight of those stuck in Afghanistan is more than a little duplicitous. How’s that ludicrously lucrative contractor paycheck look now? How much is it going to cost the American taxpayer to free those hostages? The State Department is quite adroit in camouflaging their egregious errors with our taxes.
Remember the National Geographic cover photo of a shawl wearing Afghan girl living in a refugee camp in Pakistan? Those enigmatic blue eyes peering at the camera? They located her after the Russians left and the U.S. moved into the “Grave of Empires”. She was a grown woman by then and that photo betrayed seething hatred of the U.S. That is called an indicator by such counterinsurgency prophets as Sir Robert K. Thompson, Frank Kitson, T.E. Lawrence, et al.
The sanctimonious – and momentary- outrage of the media regarding the current departure debacle is nauseating considering its’ complicity with both wars. Knight Ridder was the only news agency to seriously investigate the fraudulent Bush / Cheney justification for those wars and were castigated by their peers for daring to question the monarchy. The specious defense “supporting a sitting president at war” is camouflage for conspiracy to commit fraud.
America has become a drunken Cyclops vomiting cash. Contractors bragging about earning over 100K in AF/Iraq then leave at the first sign of danger (if any). Taxpayers tolerating monumental fraud, waste and abuse in a fraudulent war “to export democracy” that had no chance of succeeding. A mostly mercenary military peopled by recruits requiring multiple moral waivers who swallowed recruiters’ assurances that if they signed up for support jobs they wouldn’t be in harm’s way. Defense contractors who bilk the taxpayer out of hundreds of billions of dollars: paying individual contractors an average of 70K a year and taking 130K for themselves per employee. This Janus-faced whining reminds me of the Ranger returning from the invasion of Grenada who said “I never thought when I signed up that I’d actually have to go into combat!” The family of slain female, native-American soldier Piestewa were angry at the government because Piestewa complained that upon enlisting in the National Guard “she never thought she would actually have to go to war”. If she hadn’t gotten lost and separated from her convoy she may still be alive today. Or if she had not cowered on the floor of her vehicle with her eyes shut and returned fire like the only male soldier there did she may have saved her own life. So much for women in combat.
Mao describes American politicians, bureaucrats and citizens as “Frogs seeing from a well”: “In approaching a problem [one] should see the whole as well as the parts. A frog in a well says. ‘The sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well.’ That is untrue, for the sky is not just the size of the mouth of the well.” meaning they perceive the world in a small, limited dimension rather than in the whole context. In foreign policy that viewpoint is called ethnocentrism. Add it to corruption and you not only have a deadly mixture but a policy doomed to fail. Ukraine and Taiwan will experience this in the near future.
Be assured, all you who profited or tolerated those morally criminal enterprises, God will not be mocked. The blood of betrayed real warriors who fought and too often died believing in a noble cause will cry from the dust to condemn you at Judgment Day. At that day you will be one of those greedy dogs “returning to their own vomit”. The condemnation of blood stained garments applies to nations as well as individuals. There’s a special place in Hell for you.
*See:
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information by Jean-Francois Revel
Trading with the Enemy: An Expose’ of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1939-1949 by Charles Higham
A Dagger in the Heart: American Policy Failures in Cuba by Mario Lazo
War is a Racket by Major General Smedley D. Butler
