With the prison abuse stories showing up in the news, the fact that much of this was at the goading of contractors, and the fact that SO MUCH of this war was vetted to private contractors to enrich themselves absent viable exit plans and absent just cause...having mainstream America learn Smedley Butler's name would aid in helping us tip momentum against this war and against Bush and his war mongering financial support. It would ALSO go a long way toward MAKING congress act to create regulations and oversight of military contractors which is currently lacking since they purchase the laws they operate under.
The thing that made me ask this question was this editorial :
Military Industrial Complexes
This article first appeared on LewRockwell.com, 03 May 04.
LINK TV's "Active Opposition" aired a show last Wednesday discussing the military industrial complex. It featured a panel discussion, opening with Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous farewell speech of 43 years ago.
In preparation for this panel, I re-read War Is a Racket, by two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Lieutenant General Smedley Butler. Butler's post-World War I, pre-World War II assessment is far more direct than Ike's speech. Marines often tend to tell it like it is.
I wonder what Butler or Ike, generals who had served in several brutal wars, would have thought about the latest news from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
Smedley Butler noticed how defense industries carefully nurtured politicians for war. Like good cops, they emphasized the job creation benefits and their own outstanding ability to produce needed armaments and supplies. All you want, and then some, yessiree! If that didn't do the trick, the bad cop defense industrial establishment worried that without war, vast debts owed them by allies or opponents might never be collected, and domestic economic collapse would follow. Politicians, unchanging from the time of Plato, knew exactly what to do.
Ike was concerned that the average American did not really understand the sycophantic and co-dependent relationship between the defense industries, the military leadership, and the Congress. He noted "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. …We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications."
This editorial:
Warring on empty
By Michael Browning, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Short, brawny, barrel-chested Sgt. Andes struck fear into our hearts. Sgt. Andes was a Marine disguised as an Army drill sergeant. He had had part of his skull blown off in Vietnam, where he once shot a Viet Cong soldier 17 times in the A Shau Valley campaign. Now, he was in charge of us.
Sgt. Andes had his skull repaired with a metal plate. The Marines had given him a medical discharge, but he loved the violence of war so much he had joined the Army and become a drill instructor. Ours.
In hot weather, it was whispered, Sgt. Andes' metal skull plate would expand and squeeze his brain. He would become a madman. With the strength of just one arm, he once picked up a soldier who was mishandling his M-16 rifle. He used the other arm to slap the soldier twice, then dropped him back to the ground.
It was very hot in the summer at Fort Jackson, S.C. We agonized over the condition of Sgt. Andes' skull plate.
We were in basic: Company A, 2nd Battalion, First Basic Combat Training Brigade, A-2-1, "King of the Hill." Basic is the eight weeks every U.S. soldier remembers most, unless he or she sees real combat. It's the closest that most people in the Army ever get to the keen edge of war, the smell of Cosmoline oil and camouflage paint and CS Agent (tear gas), the clump of combat boots and the clink of dog tags, the cool ooze of mud beneath your gut as you low-crawl, the way your steel helmet bangs on your head when you doubletime, and the endless, hot boredom of standing in line for laundry, for pay, for rifles, for ammo, for chow, for mail, for vaccinations, for everything.
Basic was the great American threshing floor, a perfectly level place where Ph.D.s scrubbed pots and peckerwoods gave orders. It was bad enough if you were a volunteer. Volunteers had asked for this. But if you were a draftee, it was pluperfect, unmerited hell. I was a draftee.
and this story which unfortunately I could only find reproduced at Freeperville:
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1129041/posts
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