Truthout (www.truthout.org)
June 23, 2005

OP-ED: THE THING WE DON'T TALK ABOUT

By William Rivers Pitt

With the revelation of the secret Downing Street Minutes, which
exposed the fact that George Bush and Tony Blair had decided to invade
Iraq in April of 2002, a heated debate has blown through media,
congressional and activist circles. The decision to go to war in Iraq
was made before any public debate was initiated, before the United
Nations was brought into the conversation, confirming that Bush's
blather about wanting peace and leaving war as the last resort was
just that: blather.

So why did we go?

It had been suspected, and has now been confirmed by the Minutes, that
Bush took us to war on false pretenses and by way of a whole
constellation of lies and exaggerations. First it was the weapons of
mass destruction that were not there. Then it was connections between
Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that did not exist. Finally, it became
about bringing freedom and democracy to the region, which has
emphatically not happened.

Threaded through the discussion was the belief that Bush and his
petroleum-company allies lusted after Iraq's oil. There was also the
idea that Bush wanted Saddam's head because of the "unfinished
business" left by his father in 1991. Some whispered that Iraq had
intended to change the monetary basis of its petroleum dealings from
the dollar to the Euro, an action that would have spelled financial
disaster for the boys in Houston. Finally, many believed Bush ramped
up a war push in order to give Republicans a flag-waving platform to
run on in the 2002 midterms.

All of these were on the table as reasons for an invasion, though most
of them were not included in public debate. Yet the real reasons
behind this war, the real reasons for many of our military actions
over the years, were never discussed. As with almost everything we
deal with today in the foreign policy realm, the real reasons we
invaded Iraq harken back to World War II and the Cold War.

When the United States jumped into World War II, President Roosevelt
ordered the American economy be put on a wartime footing. This was a
sound decision: the country had to speed its industrial capabilities
up to a sprint in order to manufacture a huge fighting army out of
whole cloth. The action was successful beyond measure. The economy was
invigorated, the war was won, and in the process the
military/industrial complex, so named by President Eisenhower, was
established as a power player in the American economy.

In 1947, President Harry Truman put forth the Truman Doctrine, a broad
policy of foreign intervention to combat the feared spread of
Communism around the world. The Doctrine was essentially created by a
small band of men like Paul Nitze, who were the precursors of what we
now call neo-conservatives. Nitze, it should be noted, was the mentor
of Paul Wolfowitz, who went on to be the mentor of Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney.

The establishment of the Truman Doctrine, the establishment of the
"permanent crisis" that was the Cold War, required that the American
economy remain on a wartime footing. There it has remained to this
day, despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the
threat of a global communist takeover. Ten thousand books have been
written on this subject, on the impact of our wartime economic footing
upon domestic policy, the environment, global affairs and politics. In
the end, however, the fact that our economy is set on a wartime
footing means one simple thing.

We need wars.

Without wars, the economy flakes and falls apart. Without wars, the
trillions of dollars spent on weapons systems, military preparedness
and a planetary army would dry up, dealing a death blow to the economy
as currently constituted. Without wars or the threat of wars, the
populace is not so easily controlled and manipulated.

Let us be clear, however. When I say "we," I do not refer to your
average working man and woman on the street. The man running the shoe
store or the woman managing the bar does not need war to remain
economically viable. The "we" I speak of is that overwhelmingly
wealthy and powerful few who have wired their fortunes into the
manufacture of weapons, the plumbing of oil, and the collection of
spoils through political largesse.

These are the people who need war. They need it to pile up the
contracts from the Pentagon, to enrich the banking institutions that
protect them, to pay the lawyers who defend them, to pay the lobbyists
who sustain them, to purchase the politicians who champion them, and
to buy up the media that hides them from sight.

Yet though this group is small in number, they are "we," for they are
our leaders and our myth-makers. They have convinced the majority of
this population that war is a necessity. They create the premises for
combat and invasion, they convince and cajole and, when necessary,
frighten us into line. All too often, almost every time, we buy into
the fictions they manufacture, thus sustaining the "permanent crisis"
mentality and the need for war after war after war.

The economic need for war creates the required excuses for war. The
"permanent crisis" of the Cold War motivated the United States to
support the Shah in Iran, a decision that led to the Islamic
Revolution and the establishment of Iran as a permanent enemy. The
Cold War motivated us to support Saddam Hussein financially and
militarily as a bulwark against Iran. The Cold War motivated us to
establish the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia to ensure a steady supply
of oil. The Cold War motivated us to support Osama bin Laden and the
so-called "Jihadists" in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet
invaders.

Now, we prepare to invade Iran. We have invaded Iraq for the second
time in 15 years. We will never invade Saudi Arabia, despite the fact
that this nation's vast wealth and Wahabbist extremists make it the
birthing bed of international terrorism. We lost two towers in New
York City at the hands of a group that we created in the 1980s to
fight the Soviets. Put plainly, the "permanent crisis" of the Cold War
created a cycle of military self-justification. We build enemies with
arms and money, and then we destroy them with arms and money, thus
keeping our wartime economy afloat.

The Cold War ended more than ten years ago, but we still need war, and
we need that "permanent crisis" to continue the cycle of military
self-justification. If a legitimate war is not available, we will
create one because we have to. We have our new "permanent crisis,"
which we call the War on Terror, another turn of the cycle created by
an attack that our foreign policy and war-justifications of the last
50 years made almost inevitable.

We need wars. That's why we are in Iraq. This invasion and occupation
of that nation has given our economy the war it needs, and has also
created the justification for future wars by creating legions of
enemies in the Mideast and around the world. Our wartime economy will
tolerate no less.

Talking about Bush's lies regarding weapons of mass destruction, or
about bringing democracy to the region, or about the dollar-to-Euro
transfer, or about the midterm elections, is window-dressing. We
invaded Iraq because we had to. This is the elephant in the room, the
foreign policy reality nobody talks about.

If you want peace, work to change the underpinnings of our economy.
Until that change is made, there will always be wars, invasions, and
lies to brings such things about. It is what it is.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally
bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't
Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

Copyright : t r u t h o u t 2005