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The Profits or the War?
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recently had one of those paradigm-shifting insights we sometimes get in the struggle for justice and peace. I was on my way into a sports arena to watch a local team play. At the gate, a police officer (not one of the arena guards) stopped me and told me I couldn’t carry my water bottle into the arena. I told him that the bottle was plastic, and I wouldn’t throw it anyway, since I was pledged to nonviolence. “Makes no difference,” he said, “You can buy another bottle inside, but you can’t take that one in.” In an instant I understood viscerally what others—and sometimes even I—had been saying for a long time. This man was not there to, as the police departments say, “serve and protect” sports fans like me. He was there to serve and protect those who were making profits from sales inside the arena.

A larger but related paradigm shift has been occurring to me as I research and organize the War Resisters League’s campaign against war profiteering, “Stop the Merchants of Death.” In the old paradigm I had thought that there have been wars, and that certain companies and corporations have made profit from those wars. In the new paradigm I have come to realize that those very companies and corporations are literally calling the shots of the U.S. government’s war-making policies. It’s not so much that they are making profits from war—their power and influence are so great that it is more accurate to say that they are making war for profit.

Outsourcing and Reconstruction
Who are those companies? There are actually two questions here: Which industries stand to profit most from war? And how do companies within those industries position themselves for maximum influence on the country’s warmaking policies?

Some businesses come to mind immediately as enterprises that would profit from making war in general or in the Persian Gulf in particular: Oil companies and weapons manufacturers, for example, would obviously add to their already bloated wealth. The Global Policy Forum has estimated that the most probable total of oil-company profits from Iraq is $95 billion a year. As to arms sales, if the U.S. government gave $1 million to the family of every U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, that would come to only five percent of the amount awarded in weapons contracts to one arms manufacturer alone—Lockheed-Martin—in 2003.

In the last decade, however, other industries, too, have acquired a stake in pressing for war. The business of military outsourcing is one. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney hired a private company to determine if it would be more efficient to outsource to private companies jobs that the military had traditionally done for itself. Predictably, the private company found that privatization would be more efficient. The company Cheney hired was Halliburton. Two years later, in 1994, Cheney—who had no previous business experience—became CEO of Halliburton. In the next 10 years, 3,000 military contracts were outsourced: contracts for building barracks and latrines; for delivering oil, ammunition, radios, phones, flak jackets and uniforms; for operating sophisticated weapons systems, building mess halls, delivering and serving food, etc. One-third of those contracts—1,000-plus—went to Halliburton. At present, only 17 percent of the logistics on the ground in Iraq are handled by Department of Defense employees. The rest are outsourced to private companies. In the meantime, Dick Cheney has returned to public office, although last year he received more than $175,000 from Halliburton in deferred payments—almost as much as he makes as Vice-President ($189,300).

In addition, we have seen the rise of “reconstruction” companies with their own stake in war-making. Here again the venture is most lucrative. For example, just before the Coalition Provisional Authority supposedly turned Iraq over to its own government, the Authority issued Order #39, which allows 100 percent unrestricted foreign ownership of all economic sectors in Iraq (except oil, which has been given to a Halliburton subsidiary) and also allows 100 percent removal of their profits out of Iraq. Order #39 will be binding for at least the next five years on whatever new government the United States and Iraq might put together (and see “Sovereignly U.S. Style,” NVA, July-August, for the truth about the extent to which the Bush administration is allowing Iraq to govern itself).

With so much money to be made from making war, these companies employ their resources to influence war-making policy via a range of known and covert activities. We are perhaps most familiar with the influence that weapons manufacturers have on law- and policy-makers through their enormous campaign contributions. United for a Fair Economy published a study in 2003 that demonstrated that “campaign contributions strongly correlate with defense contracts”; and an article by international relations expert Chalmers Johnson on patterns of campaign contributions reveals the impact of campaign contributions even in a local election—in this case, in the 50th Congressional District of California (www.commondreams.org/views04/0926-01.htm). We see another source of influence typified by Vice President Dick Cheney, only the foremost of a host of public office holders or military commanders in the “revolving door” of business and government.

A less well-known but perhaps equally powerful road to corporate influence on war-making is via the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, more commonly known as the Defense Policy Board. These 31 people, hand-picked by the Pentagon, meet at least four times a year to advise the Secretary and Under Secretary of Defense (a list of current members can be found at www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dpbmembers.html). Many of them are former high-ranking military officers, like David Jeremiah (Ret. Adm., USN) and Jack Sheehan (Ret. Gen., USMC), or former policy makers or consultants (like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Vice President Dan Quayle and former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown). Some are captains of industry.

The Pentagon argues that these experts are the best source of information for the armed forces. But even the briefest look at their background reveals a problem. Jack Sheehan, for example, is on the board of Bechtel, one of the chief beneficiaries of “reconstruction” contracts in Iraq. Harold Brown is on the board of Phillip Morris, which receives contracts from the Department of Defense. James Schlesinger, CIA director under the Carter and Nixon administrations, is also a trustee of the RAND corporation, which receives tens of millions of dollars to research for the U.S. military; he is also chair of the board of MITRE Corporation, which received hundreds of millions of dollars in military contracts in the last two years. CIA Director James Woolsey is on the Defense Policy Board and is also a vice president of Booz Allen and Hamilton, which received $680 million in military-related contracts in 2003. Former Pentagon employee and Defense Policy Board member Christopher A. Williams now works for Johnston and Associates, which also lobbies Capitol Hill for major weapons manufacturers like Boeing, TRW and Northrup-Grumman.

It seems clear that we have at least conflicts of interest here, yet the dossiers and backgrounds of the Defense Policy Board members are not made public, but are examined only by the Pentagon. With their extravagant salaries paid not by the public, but by the corporations, to whom do these advisers owe allegiance?

Perhaps it is too strong a statement to say that these companies have conscripted the U.S. military for their profit-making. But when we look at the new “market economy” that the United States is setting up in Iraq, we can offer convincing arguments that the Bush administration in its invasion and ongoing occupation is seeking a corporate takeover of an entire nation. And thus our troops are not there to serve and protect Iraqis, or to ensure democracy, or to free Iraq from torture or rid the country of weapons of mass destruction. In the end, like the officer I encountered at the arena, our troops are serving and protecting, not the people, but those who are making the profits—in this case, from the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In the WRL’s “Stop the Merchants of Death” campaign, we have developed a step-by-step nonviolent strategy for confronting and disarming companies that make war for profit. We believe that if we can remove the profit from war-making, we will have removed one of the principle motives for war. Get in touch with our National Office and join us.

G. Simon Harak, WRL’s Anti-Military Coordinator, has published four books, including, most recently, Nonviolence for the Third Millennium.