The United States and its allies have initiated their formal and public bombing campaign against the forces of ISIL in Syria. The iron mongers will be filling their coffers with money paid for by the exchange of blood for profit. They are even bringing their most expensive and shiny new toys to the fight--the F-22 is the most sophisticated fighter aircraft ever made, and it is having its coming out party not against China or some of other "peer" or "near peer" threat, but rather against a group of land pirates.
You can't get more sales unless you show the goods or perhaps even give a free taste; the iron mongers are akin to crack dealers.
To paraphrase the always wise and insightful character Quark from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "my cousin is an arms merchant. He owns a small moon. Instead, I am a people person. Where has that gotten me?"
The near term is now the present: the cash registers are now ringing and the stock is going up for the companies that manufacture and maintain the weapon systems being used, right now, in Iraq and Syria.
Fortune recently detailed how war remains good for business, and offered up the following details:
So defense analysts are pointing to a pair of sure-bet paydays from the new campaign: for those making and maintaining the aircraft, manned and unmanned, that will swarm the skies over the region, and for those producing the missiles and munitions that will arm them.
American military operations targeting ISIS have cost some $600 million since mid-June, with the U.S. now spending more than $7.5 million a day on the conflict by the Pentagon’s own accounting. Zakheim estimates that this figure could conceivably double as the operations intensify and the theater widens to Syria, with a significant chunk of the expenditures going to munitions.
The total price tag for the open-ended conflict, expected to be measured in years rather than months, is anybody’s guess. In the immediate term, however, the White House is pressing Congress to approve $500 million to fund the training and equipping of pro-Western rebel groups in Syria. That alone could mean extra work for a wide array of prime defense contractors, according to Gursky. In the longer run, one defense appropriations lobbyist predicts—a hopeful note in his voice: “we’re going to have to bust through the budget caps” imposed on the military by the sequester cuts. “We can’t fight this on the cheap,” he says.
Some questions...
Is it possible to live a morally just and ethical life by investing in the companies that will profit from the United States' and its allies' intervention against ISIL? Is our morality bounded in this regard, i.e. is investing in the companies that makes bombs, planes, missiles, bullets, and other implements of war and killing different from buying stock in the prison industrial complex? If so, why?
General Smedley Butler was one of the greatest soldiers to ever serve in the military of the United States. He was an advocate for veterans and a true patriot.
In his powerful anti-war treatise, Butler famously said that:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
He brilliantly continued with a devastating insight that was as true during the first part of the twentieth century with its anti-black racial pogroms of "Red Summer'", as it is today in the first part of the twenty-first century, when a black man is President of the United States:
“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.”
The elected officials and others who crafted the policies which have committed the American military to war in Syria and Iraq (and a near perpetual state of conflict from the end of World War 2 to the present) will receive monetary profits, both direct and indirect, from their decisions. Some will leave jobs in the Pentagon and Congress to become lobbyists for the armaments industry. And there are elected officials and other beltway insiders who hold stock in the companies which make the weapons that are used as a result of the former's decisions.
The relationship between American militarism and the country's policymakers is a moral hazard in extremis. Are the American people silent on this issue because they are ignorant? Have they so bought into the lie of American exceptionalism and the country as a force for "freedom" and "democracy" that they are unable to understand that war is a hustle and a racket which feeds off of their blood, treasure, and collective souls?
Or do the American people know that the country has run off of the rails--and that militarism is part of the problem--but they have made the realpolitik judgement that their elected officials do not really care about either their well-being or opinions?