In article <br83ae$10ou$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Starman says...

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist." ~ President Dwight D.
Eisenhower


"The institutionalization of militarism under the guise of national
security was a logical expression of the aspirations articulated by
the Council of Foreign Relations before and during the Second World
War. This development was recognized by the historian Charles Beard,
who charged in 1948 that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately led the
nation to war and knowingly violated the Constitution to do so. Beard
warned at that time that Madisonian principles of checks and balances
were in Jeopardy and that the executive branch would gain control of
foreign policy and war making in the postwar period through the
expansion of state secrets.

The Smith Act of 1940 and the InternalSecurity Act of 1950, together
with the National Security Act of 1947 ... remain as the cornerstone
of the government's authority to suppress internal dissent under the
guise of national security.

Military planners and political leaders realized that implementing
this grand design would require mobilizing the American people into a
permanent state of quasi-war. Accordingly, an emotional substitute for
an official state of war would have to be devised. In 1944, Charles E.
Wilson, president of General Electric and later Director of Defense
Mobilization under President Truman and Secretary of Defense under
President Eisenhower, warned in an internal memo that "the revulsion
against war not too long hence will be an almost insuperable obstacle
for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin
now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent war economy." 

Almost forty years later, Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of
Defense under Ronald Reagan, argued that "democracies will not
sacrifice to protect their security in the absence of a sense of
danger. And every time we create the impression that we and the
Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we diminish
that sense of apprehension."

In 1956, when Eisenhower agreed to establish an ad hoc committee of
private citizens to study a proposal for the government to spend $40
billion over a number of years to erect shelters to protect the
population from nuclear fallout. The committee, composed of
businessmen and academic specialists with close ties to military
personnel and large defense contractors, was chaired by H. Rowan
Gaither, a lawyer who was also chair of both the Ford Foundation and
the Air Force's main "think tank," the Rand Corporation in California.
Almost all members of the committee were private consultants to 
the National Security Council.

The committee took upon itself the task of expanding its mission
beyond Eisenhower's mandate by investigating other uses for the $40
billion. When finished, the "Gaither Report" used the same arguments
originally advanced in NSC 68 to argue for a military buildup and to
accuse the Eisenhower administration of "complacency" in the face of
the Soviet "threat." It exerted pressure on the administration to
maintain not only the capability to initiate a nuclear war, but to
undertake covert actions against guerrilla insurgencies and to fight a
large-scale conventional war. It advocated a boost in military
spending to $48 billion per year, $10 billion more than the amount
recommended by the Eisenhower administration. The committee said that
'military "needs," irrespective of domestic priorities, should
henceforth be identified as the standard for determining the
Pentagon's budget.'

Today, over 30,000 companies are engaged in military production.
During the Second World War, production was carried out in 1,600
federally owned plants; only fifty-eight currently are owned by the
government. Each year, more than 15 million contracts (over 52,000
each day) are signed between government and private companies. In
fiscal 1985, the United States spent almost $1,100 per person on the
military, in contrast to its European allies, which spent an average
of $250 per person. In the mid-1980s, about $146 billion in private
military business was generated by the Pentagon each year. During the
Reagan administration, spending for military research increased 62
percent above the rate of inflation, while funding for civilian
research fell by 10 percent.

... the militarization of the economy has created a complex system of 
dependence on military spending that will not easily be broken. Only
nine of the 3,041 counties in the United States received less than
$1,000 from the Defense Department in 1984. With so many constituents
on the military payroll, few congressional representatives can afford
to attack waste and fraud vigorously or to I challenge the Pentagon s
priorities without fear of retribution. In 1983, Defense Secretary
Caspar Weinberger accused Congress of tacking nearly $3 billion worth
of unnecessary items onto the Pentagon budget. [1990] Roughly
3,275,000 jobs in the United States are in defense industries, up from
314,000 in 1940. There are almost 1.5 million military retirees in
addition to the 3,295,000 people on the civilian and active military
payrolls. The link between corporations and the military is solidified
by the retention of retired officers as employees of private
contractors. Employed by 157 major military contractors were 1,350
former high-ranking military officers, plus 316 former high-ranking
officials of the Defense Department.

The considerable influence of the military-industrial complex with
Congress has been reinforced by the system of campaign financing.
Political action committees representing the largest twenty defense
contractors increased their contributions 225 percent during the first
six years of the Reagan administration.

>From 1965 to 1975, the U.S. spent between $159.4 billion (DOD's

estimate) and $239.6 billion (U.S. Senate estimate) on the war. The
14,392,302 tons of explosives (more than used against Japan in the
Second World War) left more than 25 million craters in a country
smaller than the state of California and reduced all North Vietnamese
cities south of Hanoi to rubble. More than 400,000 tons of napalm and
19 million gallons of herbicides (including 11 million gallons of
Agent Orange) were used to destroy the croplands and half the forests
in the country. Some 58,655 U.S. troops were killed. More than
2,000,000 Vietnamese, one-ninth of the population, were killed."

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Democracy_America/Democratic_Facade.html
**************************
The article above was published in 1991, but it's still very relevant
today -- just replace references to 'Vietnam' with 'Iraq', and
substantially increase Pentagon budget and campaign donation amounts
in-line with the expanded  role of corporate and special interests in
influencing domestic, defense, economic, trade, and foreign policies
by way of the American ruling-class Plutocracy.
____________________
It's the Oil, Stupid--The reason the United States has a legitimate
and critical interest in seeing that Persian Gulf oil continues to
flow copiously and relatively cheaply is simply that the global
economy built over the last 50 years rests on a foundation of
inexpensive, plentiful oil, and if that foundation were removed, the
global economy would collapse.
~ Former Clinton official Kenneth Pollack, echoing Kissinger's words

>from two decades earlier, being blunt about the oil connection

Overthrowing Saddam Hussein, creating a client state in Iraq, and
opening up Iraq's economy are key components of a much larger,
multi-faceted global agenda in which energy resources play a crucial
role. The point is not that the Bush inner circle waged war simply to
secure Iraq's oil for American profit or consumption. Yet petroleum
was a central and major objective--if understood in the larger context
of global empire. Most broadly, the 2003 invasion and occupation were
designed to solidify American  political/military domination of the
energy heart of world -- the Middle East/Central Asian region, and are
part of broader efforts to secure control of global energy sources and
use that control to ensure the smooth functioning of U.S. capitalism,
strengthen its competitive position in world markets, and increase
U.S. leverage against potential rivals. In short, oil is a powerful
instrument of hegemony, which is what the new Bush II National
Security Strategy is all about.
    Controlling Persian Gulf oil and dominating world energy markets
has been a prime U.S. strategic objective for over 60 years, as
examined in previous chapters. However, the global energy picture does
not remain constant: the tension between supply and demand evolves,
and new dynamics and problems arise. Two trends stand out today: the
precarious nature of the global economy and the possibility that
growing energy demand will outstrip the global capacity to meet it. 
   A look at these concerns and how the capitalist political elite is
approaching them opens a window on some of the deep compulsions and
potential opportunities that drove the 2003 war on Iraq and continue
to drive the Bush II global agenda.
from-- Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and the US Global Agenda
By Larry Everest
*************
Iraq Democracy-- US Style?
http://www.progressive.org/webex03/wx120403.html
December 4, 2003
Rigging Iraq's Elections

Ever since Bush was unable to unearth a single weapon of mass
destruction in Iraq, he has shifted propaganda gears and talked more
about how U.S. troops are installing democracy in Iraq. But the truth
of the matter is, Bush doesn't want any old democracy in Iraq. He only
wants a so-called democracy if he can pick the head of the new
government . That's why he's resisting the call from Iraq's leading
Shiite cleric to hold popular elections in June. The Bush
Administration fears that a direct election would bring a Shiite to
power whom Washington might not be able to push around. That leader
could align with Iran, or renationalize industries, or order the U.S.
troops out. And Bush wants none of that. So he ordered Bremer to
construct an elaborate process of picking electors around the country,
a process the U.S. would control.

Bush's first excuse was that there isn't a decent census yet of Iraq's
voting population, and there couldn't be one anytime soon. When people
pointed out that the U.N. had such a census for the distribution of
food rations, the Bush Administration pooh-poohed that.
Then it turned out that the Iraqi Ministry of Planning actually drew
up a plan for a thorough census that could be completed by September
1, but somehow that plan was not distributed to all the members of the
Iraqi Governing Council, as The New York Times reported on December 4.
The U.S. pooh-poohed this plan, too.

Listen to the rationale from Charles Heatley, spokesman for the U.S.
occupation: "Rushing into a census in this time frame with the
security environment that we have would not give the result that
people want," he told the Times. Which people is he referring to? Bush
and Bremer? Heatley added, "There is concern not to rush the process."
Or as Noah Feldman, a former adviser to Bremer, said in an article on
November 29: "Simply put, if you move too fast, the wrong people get
elected."

Ah, yes. We're for democracy. Just not yet. Not until we've rigged the
outcome. -- Matthew Rothschild
*********
fwd//Starman

. . . and so it goes.