Why We Fight

By WERTHER

January 8, 2007

Counterpunch

“War is a racket. It always has been.

“It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

General Smedley Butler (1935)

As is our habit, we are wont to read The Washington Post, bulletin board of the Beltway illuminati, in Pravda fashion, from back to front, concentrating on subject matter mentioned three quarters of the way through the article. Let us take the Wednesday, 27 December edition of the Meyer-Graham newsletter as an example.

We learn, surprisingly on the front page, that Ethiopia has stepped up attacks on Somalia. Only on the jump page, however, towards the end of the 1,100-word article, does one uncover the Hitchcockian McGuffin:

” . . . U.S. policy in Somalia has been widely criticized for having the opposite of its intended effect, often encouraging the expansion of the [Islamic] Courts movement. This year, the United States supported warlords who called themselves an “anti-terrorism” coalition. The warlords generally bribed [sic. This must be a misstatement intended to mean "sought extortion payments from"] and terrorized ordinary Somalis, who came to despise them. The Islamic Courts came to power as an alternative to the hated warlords, establishing order based on Islamic law village by village and earning widespread support from beleaguered Somalis tired of 15 years of near-anarchy.”

So, as the war on terror[ism] spreads through the Horn of Africa with its attendant misery, it just so happens that the United States government helped to fuel it. In its broad outlines, this is just how a $3.5-billion covert operation in Afghanistan two decades ago helped bring us a hole in Lower Manhattan. Or how our covert assistance to a Mesopotamian up-and-comer named Saddam Hussein led, like some Sophoclean tragedy [2], to the current “grave and deteriorating” circumstances in Iraq.

How is it that so many wars have an act of U.S. complicity in their origin? Is it merely the law of unintended consequences, or is there another logic at work? Perhaps the crucial mechanism in Mogadishu, and Kabul, and Baghdad is best described by that hoary Pentagon slang phrase, “the self-licking ice cream cone.” [3]

The axiom of the self-licking ice cream cone has many applications, not only in the ignition of wars, but in their conduct. Again, the Post provides a kind of Delphic clue about this mechanism. The 26 December edition has a fascinating piece buried on page 19: “Old Iraq Strategy Lives On in Weekly Progress Reports.” [4] The writer, Glenn Kessler, pokes a bit of fun at a series of weekly reports promulgated by the State Department to measure alleged “progress” in Iraq; indeed, this is the gravamen of the piece: how upbeat the reports can be despite a manifestly failed policy.

But again, as with the Somalia story, the lede is buried. Well into the piece, Kessler informs us that the weekly Iraq reports are produced by the consulting firm BearingPoint. But that is not the end of the story:

“The BearingPoint employees, who work out of offices in the State Department, arrange the meetings, set the agendas, take notes and provide summaries of the discussions, the official said. They also maintain the Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.”

As any veteran of bureaucratic wars surely knows, whoever arranges meetings, sets agendas, and takes the official notes determines the policy, regardless of who is nominally in charge. But who is BearingPoint, and what interest do they have in Iraq? The media watchdog Sourcewatch.org provides the following:

In July of 2003, BearingPoint was awarded a contract by USAID worth $79.5 million to facilitate Iraq’s economic recovery with a two-year option worth a total of $240,162,688. Responsibilities in this contract include:

1. Creating Iraq’s budget.

2. Writing business law.

3. Setting up tax collection.

4. Laying out trade and customs rules.

5. Privatize state-owned enterprises by auctioning them off or issuing Iraqis shares in the enterprises.

6. Reopen banks and jump-start the private sector by making small loans of $100 to $10,000.

7. Wean Iraqis from the U.N. oil-for-food program, the main source of food for 60% of the population.

8. Issue a new currency and set exchange rates.

One is surprised that BearingPoint is not charged with rewriting Iraq’s national anthem and choosing the members of its Olympic team. But, again, who is BearingPoint? That is hardly a name that rolls off the tongue like Microsoft, or Morgan Guaranty Trust.

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