Only Systemic Change
Will End Wars for Profit

EDITORIAL / The Commemorator v.17, n.2, 1jul2007

Published by the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party
Melvin Dickson, CCBPP Chair and Editor

[More on the Panthers]

Many of those who helped engineer, promote and lead the Iraqi war are now pointing fingers of blame, jumping ship, writing books or running for President. While the so-called "debate" about how to end the war is given daily headlines in the media, the class of people with companies profiting immensely from the continuation of this and other wars, both current and in the making, and involved in the "redevelopment" of the now destroyed infrastructure of Iraq, are busy putting in the processes, systems and structures to maximize their ability to continue to profit from their investments and control the region for that purpose. Meanwhile our people, at home and abroad, continue to die as the government and the media put on a display of arguments about timetables for the public.

It is well-documented that even before the "official" public decision to invade Iraq on March 20, 2003, the U.S. executive branch was laying plans to "rebuild" the country after fighting ceased. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) asked (secretly at the time, now "disclosed" in mainstream media) six U.S. companies to submit bids for $900 million in government contracts to repair and reconstruct water systems, roads, bridges, schools and hospitals in Iraq — before the invasion had occurred. Those six companies were Bechtel Group, Inc., Fluor Corp., Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), Louis Berger Group, Inc., Parsons Corp. and Washington Group International, Inc. These six companies also contributed a combined $3.6 million in individual, Political Action Committee (PAC) and soft money political campaign donations between 1999 and 2002.

Forty-two percent of that total went to Republicans, and forty-four percent went to Democrats — almost 50-50 when it comes down to it. Bechtel, the engineering giant that had employed on its executive staff the likes of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, former Secretary of State George Shultz and former CIA Director William Casey before they took their government posts, gave $1.3 million in individual, PAC and soft money contributions between 1999 and 2002. Bechtel was among 24 U.S. companies that also sup-plied Iraq with weapons during the 1980s when it was at war with Iran, and the U.S. was funding and arming Saddam Hussein.

Kellogg, Brown & Root and their parent company Halliburton (which was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney until 2000, when he advised Bush to take him on as Vice President) was the second-largest "donor" of this group of international monopoly bastions of wealth and power with more than $709,000 in contributions to election campaigns on both sides of the aisle.

The company Fluor, which gave more than $483,000 in individual, PAC and soft money contributions in the previous two election cycles, also has ties to the Defense Department. Kenneth Oscar, the company's vice president of strategy and government services, recently served as the acting assistant Secretary of the Army, where he directed its $35 billion-a-year procurement budget.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), a sole-source monopoly contract to repair and operate Iraq's oil infrastructure. The contract was awarded in secrecy without any competing bids from other qualified companies. Halliburton charged the government $2.4 billion for its work, and despite a little flurry of investigations by the Defense Contract Audit Agency challenging portions of the bill, the U.S. government paid Halliburton all but a small fraction of it, and continues to pay, as the con-tracts and bills have, of course, not stopped.

While a great deal has now been "exposed" about the extent that this war is being run by private contract, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater U.S.A., who is an investigative reporter for The Nation, summed it up well in his testimony May 10, 2007 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense:

"We are now in the midst of the most privatized war in the history of our country. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is one that has greatly accelerated since the launch of the "global war on terror" and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many Americans are under the impression that the U.S. currently has about 145,000 active duty troops on the ground in Iraq. What is seldom mentioned is the fact that there are at least 126,000 private personnel deployed alongside the official armed forces. These private forces effectively double the size of the occupation force, largely without the knowledge of the U.S. taxpayers who foot the bill. But despite the similarity in size of these respective forces in Iraq, there are key differences with the way our government approaches the active-duty military and these private war contractors. For instance, we know that nearly 3,400 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq and more than 25,000 wounded. We do not know the exact number of private contractors killed or wounded. Through the U.S. Department of Labor, we have been able to determine that at least 770 contractors had been killed in Iraq as of December 2006 along with at least 7,700 wounded. These casualties are not included in the official death count and help to mask the human costs of the war. More disturbing is what this means for our democracy: at a time when the administration seems unwilling to subject its war strategy to over-sight by the Congress, we face the widespread use of private forces seemingly accountable to no effective system of oversight or law."

But, then, he is operating on the assumption that we have a democracy to begin with. That assumption is the most dangerous of all, because until we acknowledge and act on the fact that the very system we are living under, not this specific war, is the underlying problem, we will go through another "anti-war" period like the Vietnam era, and come out of it with the same class and same policies still in power and intact.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine, as it is called in the government and the press, is the Pentagon policy that Rumsfeld installed that emphasized covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article titled "Transforming the Military," for the journal Foreign Affairs. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists."

From the moment the U.S. troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. As the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modem war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq — an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers. They are still there, and the policies attributed to him are still in force.

As of May 9, 2007 in addition to the U.S. soldiers killed, permanently disabled or seriously wounded and the deaths and disabling of privatized contracted soldiers (also known as mercenaries, by definition), hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, many more wounded, and millions of Iraqis now live as refugees in camps in Jordan and other bordering countries, having to flee from the violence and destruction.

In northern California, Chico State students and Chico residents recently covered Children's Park in a sea of white and red flags to honor people who have died in the Iraq war. Volunteers set up about 128,000 flags along the park's fence. Each of the 125,000 white flags represented five or six Iraqis who have died in the war. About 3,000 red flags represented each American soldier who has died in the war so far.

To date, U.S. spending on the war in Iraq has been $500 billion and the spending continues to increase. By the end of this fiscal year, $151.1 billion will have been spent; an amount that could have paid for comprehensive health care for 82 million U.S. children or the salaries of nearly 3 million elementary school teachers. According to the government's own figures, the war costs the American taxpayers $2 billion each day.

When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were aiming for the U.S. Gulf Coast, not a penny was spent by the U.S. government to get working and poor people out of harm's way, and after it hit, the National Guard of Mississippi and Louisiana weren't there to rescue anyone. They and their equipment were in Iraq. And who got the government contracts to rebuild the Astrodome in New Orleans, and fix the infrastructure for the new corporate offices that sprang up immediately? That's right, some of the same big corporations. Meanwhile, the government drags its feet in providing the aid to low-income working Katrinavictims to be able to return to rebuild their homes. That's not on the federal government's agenda.

In addition to aggressive military recruitment in poor communities and poor neighborhoods throughout the U.S., the federal government also enlists immigrants into the military with the enticement of a ticket to admission to U.S. citizenship. And the latest decision to offer those convicted of misdemeanors the "opportunity" to join the military as an alternative to jail time now adds to the government's tactics of trying to keep the ranks of their "volunteer" army at the needed level. The New York Times reported a few months ago in a small article in the back pages (a story never picked up and discussed further since) that there have been over 3,000 instances of desertions and AWOLS by U.S. soldiers in the military in the last year. Their wars of aggression are clearly dependent on the use of mercenaries and private contractors. This war is not being driven by any desire for freedom from terror, but by the desire for continued and ever-increasing profit for the very few, by use of terror, while bleeding the U.S. population dry, while keeping them compliant with the beat of the drums of fear. At the same time, the U.S. government is operating with an eight trillion dollar debt and is driving up that amount up daily.

The Vietnam War, the Iraq War:
Lies as Policy Continue

None of his is new; none of this was just created with this war. It is par and parcel of the current economic system and the ongoing policies of the current class in power.

The supposed bogeyman the U.S was fighting to defeat in the days of the Vietnam War was "Communism.' Today's bogeyman, is "Terrorism.' The fear that the U.S. government instills in the populace through constant hue and cry enables the govern ment to install Homeland Security am the Patriot Act to use against the American people. The politics of scapegoatism in the hands of the government are in full gear, only rivaled in the annals of history by the use of scapegoatism by the Nazis in Germany. That is why the government and the mass media's attacks against political prisoners, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, (see the lead article in this issue of COMMEMORATOR) and groups such as the San Francisco Eight (see page 3) are so fierce and so common.

The "Surge" campaign in Iraq and the U.S. escalation of the Vietnamese War in 1964 under President Lyndon B. Johnson bear resemblances worth considering. The media campaign the government utilizes to sell these wars is geared toward preserving the goals and interests of the U.S. bourgeoisie's monopoly capitalist control and American military supremacy throughout the world. The cost of both wars came directly from tax dollars previously used to provide services and benefits for the working class and the low-income and minority communities; both wars were escalated through the government's use of intentional lies to continue their escalation.

With President Johnson's Tonkin Gulf Resolution, subsequently proven to be based on untrue charges of attacks by North Vietnam on U.S. military ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, the anti-communist propaganda entered a new phase. With the approval of the resolution by Congress, Mr. Johnson did not waste any time attacking North Vietnam, for the resolution made it possible for the Administration then to escalate the war into a conflagration that cost the American people dearly in both human suffering and cost, and cost the Vietnamese people far,-far more devastation and misery.

"The U.S. Navy was supporting secret hit-and-run raids by South Vietnamese commandos against the North Vietnamese coast in the Gulf of Tonkin. U.S. war ships regularly patrolled in sight of shore, inside North Vietnamese territorial waters," reported then Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, "The U.S. administration sensed the opportunity it had been waiting for. President Johnson announced that any `unprovoked military action' would lead to `grave consequences." Johnson then issued a false report, a lie — that the U.S. ship had been attacked, and used that as a basis for the U.S. onslaught.

As the deception and U.S. military aggression escalated, amid mass anti-war protests at home and around the world,the Johnson administration had to step down by not running for re-election. But the segment of the U.S. ruling class, the military-industrial complex that even President Eisenhower warned against, was still in the saddle, just with a different Executive office administration.

Today over 64 % of the American people do not support the current "surge" policy of military escalation in Iraq and Afghanistan. This administration may also now pass. But do not be deceived by the new faces.

We understand that this is a fight between the working class and the international monopoly capital ruling class whose bottom line is about maximizing profits throughout the world at any cost, no. matter what price the people of the world must pay. For the ruling class to win and stay on top, they must continue to enslave and heighten the exploitation and control of the working class. Nothing works so well for the bourgeoisie as their divide and conquer strategy to keep the working class disorganized and unable to change this condition. Whether country against country, race against race. or whatever other divisions they can exploit, the result is the same. For us to survive and get on top of this. and stop them. we must build organization that thwarts their ability to do that.

About 95% people on this planet must work to survive. Yet it is that other 5% who own most of the resources and do not work; they just move their money around the world and use their power to extract every cent of surplus value they can from the backs of the working class. There are more of us than there are of them — we just need more people to wake-up, get past their hesitancy, fear, complacency, nostalgia or whatever may be holding you back, and get busy organizing!

To build healthy communities and end crime, we must end poverty. This is a right: access to employment, income, education, health care and security is a right. This is what the BPP Ten Point Program is all about.

But no one has ever given us our rights or our freedom — remember? We have to organize and take it.

Those who want to help bring about this change, should call COMMEMORATOR at 510-652-7170 and ask for Arthur Thompson, Volunteer Coordinator.

All Power to the People