<strong>Written By:</strong> 4Canada
<strong>Date:</strong> 2006-04-04 10:37:00
<a href="/article/223742112-war-a-theft-from-those-who-hunger">Article Link</a>

What Eisenhower saw 45 years ago has metastasized into a gargantuan military juggernaut whose cost exceeds the arms expenditures of all other nations combined. Eisenhower would be stunned at the growth of this beast now sucking wealth, life, and democracy out of America. It has become the tail that wags the dog, a force so huge and thoroughly ingrained in our culture and political institutions that some believe its dominance has become irreversible.

Consider that there are currently over 700 U.S. military bases spread around the globe, a modern equivalent of the Roman legions once covering a huge portion of the known world. The cost of such a smothering presence is intentionally obscured to divert attention from the scope of our military program. The announced Pentagon budget of $439 billion dollars per year is pure pixie dust. Iraq and Afghanistan war costs (another $120 billion this year) are not even included in the figure but covered by supplemental requests to Congress. Absent this and other means of budgetary sleight of hand, the real cost of our military probably approaches three quarters of a trillion dollars per year. Even in America, that should be viewed as an impressive number.

How did we reach such an unsustainable and perilous point in our history?

As the memorable line goes in "All the President's Men," "Follow the money." Simply put, war is profitable. Although it is hell for people, it is good for business. Think Halliburton, Northrop, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon.... and the thousands of smaller companies feeding the insatiable maw of our military appetite. Ships, tanks, Hummers, planes, helicopters, drones, missiles, atomic bombs - all the high tech toys to delight the hearts of our war lords. And all produced by companies bloated with unconscionable profits derived from cost plus contracts and anemic federal oversight.

<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0403-21.htm">http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0403-21.htm</a>





[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on April 5, 2006]

   

""Eisenhower certainly realized the dreadful cost of war making. In 1953 he addressed newspaper editors, outlining what is sacrificed on the human level when we use war as a short sighted solution to our problems:


"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross.""

there will be those here that take a different view, of that I am certain.
I read their posts championing war as though there are no behind the scenes action, no backroom out of ear-shot and site of we, the great un washed.
Those who would manufacture consent (see Chomsky&#8217;s book on that topic) know full- well sheep follow, greed and the lust for power knows no bounds, nor does the gullibility of those who blindly (or is it blandly?) follow and in collusion are as guilty as those they follow.







---
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound

   

As wealth can not be created, only taken, war is an important part of the global economic competition for "taking".

Ed Deak.

   

As a two-and-a-half-years old youngster in the occupied Netherlands during the last month of WWII (April 1945), my life was probably spared by food droppings by American airplanes, ending what is called the "famine-winter".

A few years later, I was taught the parable of the Good Samaritan. No wonder that, with all the Marshall Plan help from the U.S., we called it the "Good American". Its icon was Ike (pun intended) who personified that when he became President.

I never knew of this speech of him. I strongly agree with it. The U.S. has really gone downhill ever since the day he stepped down.

   

War is a means of transferring funds from the public to the arms manufacturers. Short and simply.

   

'It does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous, the essential act of warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour'

- George Orwell, 1984.