Sunday, September 1, 2013

WHY The Need for so many Military Attacks? It's the Defense Contracts, Stupid!


On the ABC Sunday Morning discussion program with George Stephanopoulos, Mideast  correspondent Martha Radditz noted Obama must proceed cautiously on the Syrian front because he will need another war authorization "in a few months" for an attack on Iran. SAY WHAT?! An attack on Iran? What is this bullshit? How many attacks are we going to be making in the volatile Middle East? Has this country totally lost its fucking marbles?

Actually no, okay let me qualify that! There is method to the madness. The method is that the more conflicts, attacks that can be expedited the more ordinance, bombs, cruise missiles, etc. are destroyed in the process of attacking and hence the more additional ordnance, bombs, cruise missiles etc. have to be manufactured to replace them! Can't have any inventory building up on the defense contractors' shelves, now can we? Oh no! That would mean loss of profits and also, god forbid, that the products already manufactured are sitting there being wasted and unused.  The idea - as with all consumption  - is use, use, USE ....so more have to be manufactured and more paid for!

This is the dirty little secret of our "war" economy highlighted by the key graphic shown above, disclosing how much of the budget the military industrial complex sucks up annually.  Here's another dirty little secret about the "sequester": there are no real cuts to military spending in any absolute terms, but only an estimated "trim down" of roughly 23% in the projected INCREASES in Pentagon spending over the next ten years!

The point here? Contrary to the bloviators' bollocks of "jeopardizing national security", just the opposite is true: the Pentagon base budget will still be larger than it is today by 2021! This necessarily means, given the zero sum resources we have, everyone else will be much poorer. That means an even more shattered and useless infrastructure with crumbling roads, cracking sewer and water mains and collapsing bridges....and a much more likely intolerable domestic environment over all.

Meanwhile, you can just imagine the weapons makers having wet dreams now over this Syria thing. At last a believable excuse has been found in some Youtube images of gassed Syrian civilians to justify firing a thousand Tomahawks at those Syrian bad guys - and letting God sort them out.  He will have to, because there likely will be as much collateral damage - with maybe twice the number as killed in the gas attack, as Syrian forces annihilated.......errrrr.....punished

Oh yeah, let's bear in mind it's a "limited strike" maybe a few days at most, maybe 300 or so Tomahawks in all. But what no one is admitting is they will have to go in again if another gas attack takes place, no matter who did it - including al Qaeda operatives trying to snag us into another expensive, long drawn out war. Sounds almost like Oceania in George Orwell's '1984' - endless war, but the purpose of which is not to win...not anything but (in the immortal words of "Goldstein"):

"War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. "

But bear in mind, unstated by Goldstein, is that any kind of war - or even a limited attack as Obama claims he has planned for Syria - has the ancillary purpose of requiring additional stores of munitions, missiles, bombs, etc. to take the place of those destroyed in the attacks - hence means more defense contracts and more profits for the Pentagon-linked parasites who are sucking us all dry. And if more chemical attacks are committed by whatever bad guys? Well, that means we have to go in again and use up more cruise missiles so that when they are blown up, more will need to be made to replace them! And on and on it goes! Since, hell, once in for a penny, we're in for a pound. As long as any sort of "violations of international norms" occur, we will have to come back and bomb the suckers again!

And then, oh yes, a major assault on Iran lies in our future! Think of how those defense contractors must be having orgasmic spasms right now contemplating the new contract bounty from THAT! Hell, maybe 10,000 bombs and cruise missiles will have to be replaced!  And HEY! Since Iranian underground nuclear facilities are fortified with "ultra-high performance concrete" (UHPC) that means the most expensive bombs (at about $5m each) will have to be used!

These, of course, are the Massive Ordinance Penetrators ("MOPS' ), which can break through 60 m of ordinary concrete, but will not necessarily be a walk in the park. That means that an enormous supply will likely have to be available, and also if all those are used up, maybe 1,000 more will have to be made. Oy! Think of the profits!

Well, it is fairly clear who wins in each of these attack scenarios, and hint, hint, it ain't the American people. It will be the MIC and the defense profiteers.

Meanwhile, the American nation is sped into further decline especially if the debt ceiling isn't properly increased next month, but we face yet another showdown.

 Btw, contrary to what some uninformed dummies assert, the 'Commander in chief' is really only a puppet who ultimately must fulfill the will of the militarists who run the Military Industrial Complex.  Their main agenda is consuming the gross domestic product for military use and they will have it done one way or the other.  Read the book, In The Shadow of War, by Michael S. Sherry. JFK's courageous mistake was to buck the militarists by issuing National Security Action Memorandum 263 (to pull all personnel out of Vietnam by 1965), and he paid the ultimate price.

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