MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Evelyn Berg)

In a recent BuzzFlash commentary it was noted that "peace is not profitable enough for the United States":

The National Priorities Project, which keeps running expenditure tabs on the costs of war, estimates that the US has now spent nearly $1.7 trillion on wars since 2001. A spokeswoman for the National Priorities Project told BuzzFlash that approximately $823 billion has been spent on the Department of Homeland Security since its creation after 9/11. She also mentioned a Washington Post article from 2013 that estimated the CIA budget at $14.7 billion. Pentagon spending alone - which comprises more than half of the US budget each year - rings in at $554 billion for 2015. To be fair, a lot of this funding overlaps, but the behemoth financial interests of the "war industry" are readily apparent from these figures. Furthermore, these estimates do not include agencies such as the State Department and many unknown "black budget" programs and smaller war and surveillance allocations.....

The dramatic expansion in privatizing war and intelligence services only increases the incentive for trying to find ways to profit from conflict and focusing on the elimination of "enemies." This includes not just the major wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan [which are funded through a supplemental war budget], but numerous spots around the world in which the US is engaged in what are called low-intensity conflicts.

In short, too many institutions, corporations and people depend upon conflict to earn their livings - and in many cases fortunes. In fact, you can add the indirect beneficiaries of the war machine to that list by including stockholders, for example, in publicly traded defense and intelligence companies. After all, the value of their stock and the size of their dividends is dependent upon contracts with the military-intelligence-surveillance-complex.

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In a commentary in TomDispatch on March 26, William D. Hartung - author of Prophets of War: Lockheed and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex – details additional evidence of a Defense Department that constantly must seek missions in order to justify its behemoth size, exotic weaponry and specially-trained troops:

In addition to maintaining its huge network of formal bases, the Pentagon is also planning to increase what it calls its "rotational" presence: training missions, port visits, and military exercises. In these areas, if anything, its profile is expanding, not shrinking. U.S. Special Forces operatives were, for instance, deployed to 134 nations, or almost 70% of the countries in the world, in fiscal year 2014. So even as the size and shape of the American military footprint undergoes some alteration, the Pentagon's goal of global reach, of being at least theoretically more or less everywhere at once, is being maintained....

Washington's strategy documents are filled with references to non-military approaches to security, but such polite rhetoric is belied in the real world by a striking over-investment in military capabilities at the expense of civilian institutions. The Pentagon budget is 12 times larger than the budgets for the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has noted, it takes roughly the same number of personnel to operate just one of the Navy's 11 aircraft carrier task forces as there are trained diplomats in the State Department. Not surprisingly, such an imbalance only increases the likelihood that, in the face of any crisis anywhere, diplomatic alternatives will take a back seat, while a military response will be the option of choice, in fact, the only serious option considered.

Hartung also notes that "More than 160 nations, or 82% of all countries, now receive some form of arms and training from the United States."

The bottom line is that conflict needs to occur in order to justify the US military empire. When this much money is invested in hi-tech equipment, soldiers, contractors, intelligence and surveillance - and defending and extending empire - warfare (whether public or clandestine) is necessary to justify taxpayer expense and to sustain the growth of the war industry, including the size of the government institutions that are dependent on ongoing worldwide conflict.

Those who use power and money to wage war also dominate the media, through the use of fear. Advocates of peace can barely be heard above the bellicose din of the jingoistic – and now sacrosanct - cry of "national security."

However, it is only through working for peace from the grassroots up that, as Gandhi showed, the high moral ground can prevail. It is a formidable challenge - and one given the human condition, an ongoing one.

Idealism, nonetheless, has prevailed over destructive forces before in the history of our species. The campaign for peace demands willfulness, longterm commitment, justice and grassroots activism to build a powerful counterforce to the entrenched forces that feed on war.

To become dismayed and disillusioned is to yield to the armies of fear and the wanton death and devastation that they cause.

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