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There are currently an estimated 42 ongoing major conflicts in the world,[1] including four major wars (the Sri Lankan civil war, war in Afghanistan, Iraq war, and the Ogaden conflict in Ethiopia). A major war is defined as one causing at least 1,000 battlefield deaths annually. Between 1946 and 2006, a total of 324 episodes of major armed conflict were recorded.[2] The end of the Cold War, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, had a dramatic effect on the general level of armed conflict in the global system. The levels of both interstate and societal warfare declined dramatically through the 1990s and this trend continues in the early 2000s, falling over 60% from their peak levels.[3] Imperialism: "For dependent societies, all avenues leading to their gaining control of their destiny-economic, financial, or military-are blocked. After all, those are the three methods of gaining, and retaining control, of the wealth-producing-process. With the imperial-centers-of-capital in control of the Western world's beliefs, any who would seriously challenge the current world political and trade structure are quickly branded an enemy and either neutralized or eliminated. This leaves billions of people unable to control their destiny and in poverty. Of those billions, the angriest will resort to their only remaining weapon, terrorism."[4] - Dr J.W. Smith Inequality: "General A.M. Gray, former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, in 1990 identified threats to the United States as originating from the "underdeveloped world's growing dissatisfaction over the gap between rich and poor nations," creating "a fertile breeding ground for insurgencies which have the potential to jeopardize regional stability and our access to vital economic and military resources" (Marine Corps Gazette, May 1990). Gray understands the structural social and economic problems, but it apparently does not occur to him that the solution might be to directly address the injustices rather than perpetuate them with the use of military force."[5] Globalization: "Far from being just a collapsing of distance and widening of opportunities for all, the increasing mobility of information, finance, goods and services frees the American government of constraints while more tightly constraining everyone else. Globalization and the global supervisory organizations enable the United States to harness the rest of the world to its own rhythms and structure. Of course these arrangements do not produce terrorism in any direct way. But they are deeply implicated in the very slow economic growth in most of the developing world since 1980, and in the wide and widening world income inequality." - Robert Hunter Wade[6] Competition over Scarce Resources as a Cause of War "(No strategic objective) has so profoundly influenced American military policy as the determination to ensure U.S. access to overseas supplies of vital resources." - Michael T. Klare.[7] "Oil is not... the only critical material that could provoke major conflict in the years ahead... While water, oil and natural gas have sparked the most intense competition, trouble is also brewing over access to minerals, gems and timber, particularly in developing nations that harbor few domestic sources of wealth."[8] "An outlook that views economic and security interests as ‘inextricably linked' will naturally tend to place high priority on the protection of vital resource supplies. Without a steady and reliable flow of essential materials, the American economy cannot expand and generate the products needed to ensure continued U.S. competitiveness in global markets."[9] "The United States is not the only nation to have assigned greater strategic significance to economic and resource concerns in the post-Cold War era. Since 1990, almost every major government has done so. While the particular character of this restructuring has varied from country to country, the overall result of these efforts has been what might be termed the economization of international security affairs."[10] "The risk of internal conflict over resources is further heightened by the growing divide between the rich and poor in many developing countries - a phenomenon widely ascribed to globalization... As supplies contract and the price of many materials rises, the poor will find themselves in an increasingly desperate situation - and thus more inclined to heed the exhortations of demagogues, fundamentalists, and extremists who promise to relieve their suffering through revolt or ethnic partition.[11] "(W)hat we are seeing is the emergence of a new geography of conflict - a global landscape in which competition over vital resources is becoming the governing principle behind the disposition and use of military power."[12] President Eisenhower, in his final address to the nation before leaving office in 1961, coined the phrase ‘military industrial complex' in reference to the growing and overbearing relationship linking militarization to politics, big business and the media: "(The) conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."[13] "Although Eisenhower, a former general, first warned of the "military-industrial complex" (which really should have been called the "military-industrial-congressional complex"), Harry Truman actually invented it. Up through World War II, the United States had no dedicated defense industry. Whenever a war arose, civilian factories converted to military production and then reconverted to commercial production once the war had ended. But Truman created the first dedicated defense industry in U.S. history by giving steady defense business to "private" companies during peacetime. Thus, it was no coincidence that unlike the periods following all previous wars - including the first few years of the Cold War subsequent to World War II - the United States did not demobilize its military after the Korean War. Thus was born the first large peacetime military in more than 175 years of U.S. history. Even during the nuclear standoff between the superpowers during the Cold War, pressures to use the historically large U.S. forces in brush-fire areas proved too intense to resist. So accompanying the atypically large peacetime military following the Korean War was an untraditional, interventionist U.S. foreign policy."[14] - Ivan Eland. "What puts the money into the pockets of rich people is having the government use public funds to develop computers, and lasers, and metallurgy -- fancy metallurgy, and avionics, and new aircraft design, and semi-conductors, and so on. Yeah, that is very good for a sector of the wealthy. It may harm the general population, but that's not the issue at stake...." - Noam Chomsky.[15] "Today, no serious economist holds the view that war is good for the economy... money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain: had it been spent on investment - whether on plants and equipment, infrastructure, research, health or education - the economy's productivity would have been increased and future output would have been greater."[16] World military expenditure in 2006 is estimated to have reached $1204 billion in current dollars.[17] This represents a 3.5 per cent increase in real terms since 2005 and a 37 per cent increase over the 10-year period since 1997.[18] The USA is responsible for 46 per cent of the world total, distantly followed by the UK, France, Japan and China with 4-5 per cent each.[19] US military spending exceeds the average amount spent by the Pentagon during the Cold War, for a military that is one-third smaller than it was just over a decade ago.[20] Top military spenders: USA at 48.8% of the world total, China at 8.28%, Russia at 4.75%, UK at 55.4%, France at 54%, Japan at 41.1%, and Germany at 37.8%.[21] The 2009 federal spending for the United States allocates 54% of the discretionary budget to defense ($541m), compared to 6.2% for education, and 5.3% for healthcare spending.[22]` Foreign aid budgets are struggling in the wake of security priorities; the US homeland security budget for 2008 exceeds $40 billion, a figure comparable to the current shortfall in annual funding required to meet the Millennium Development Goals. "Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they are now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon... While the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground. The investigation has also discovered that the proportion of contracted security personnel in the firing line is 10 times greater than during the first Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were about 100 servicemen and women; now there are 10. The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat, occupation and peacekeeping duties that the phenomenon may have reached the point of no return: the US military would struggle to wage war without it."[23] "Mercenaries are still the image in many people's minds of private warfare, but private companies now provide services ranging from personal security and weapons maintenance to the interrogation of prisoners. They have operated in more than 50 countries and been hired by everyone from the Pentagon to dictators. In Iraq they are essential to the war effort, making up for troop shortages and doing the jobs the US military doesn't want to do. Still largely unregulated, they have also been involved in some of the more controversial aspects of the war. In the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, US army investigators discovered that contractors were involved in more than a third of the proven incidents."[24] At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation.[25] Based on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) recently determined that the Iraq war costs $720 million per day, $500,000 per minute - enough to provide homes for nearly 6,500 families, or health care for 423,529 children in just one day.[26] "(T)he "troops out" debate overlooks an important fact. If every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country; by foreign corporations controlling its essential services; by 70% unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs. Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for an end to Iraq's military occupation, but to its economic colonisation as well. That means reversing the shock therapy reforms that US occupation chief Paul Bremer has fraudulently passed off as "reconstruction", and cancelling all privatisation contracts that are flowing from these reforms." - Naomi Klein, 2003.[27] "(T)he country (of Iraq) is being treated as a blank slate on which the most ideological Washington neoliberals can design their dream economy: fully privatized, foreign-owned and open for business."[28] "Occupied Iraq is being turned into a twisted laboratory for freebase free-market economics, much as Chile was for Milton Friedman's "Chicago boys" after the 1973 coup."[29] According to the classified National Intelligence Estimate 2006, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism, and the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks - contrary to justificatory claims for the War on Terror from the White House and the British government.[30] Small arms: There are at least 550 million legally-held firearms in the world today - at least 1 gun for every 11 people in the world. Over half of these are privately owned (not accounting for the unknown number of illegal firearms).[31] At least 347 million small arms were produced worldwide between 1945 and 2000.[32] More than 1.4 million military-style small arms were produced outside the US, between 1980 and 1999.[33] Arms sales to developing countries together far outweighs arms sales to developed countries.[34] How the arms trade benefits from economic globalization: "(A)rms corporations derive a double benefit from the WTO system: not only do they profit from the elimination of environmental, health, and labor standards generated by the WTO process, but their own activities in the military sphere -- including massive research and export subsidies from their home governments -- are EXEMPT from challenge under WTO rules."[35] "(A)t the WTO, and in all other global agreements, the military is specifically excluded from the rules governing global trade. The main WTO governing document, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), states that a country cannot be prevented from taking any action ‘it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests... relating to the traffic in arms, ammunition and implements of war and such traffic in other goods and materials as is carried on directly for the purpose of supplying a military establishment'. In other words, the WTO GATT and other trade agreements do not apply to the arms trade. There are no international restrictions on what munitions a country can buy or sell, how much these should cost, how much a country can spend, who they buy weapons from or to what extent they subsidize their own arms industry. This process has contributed to the pattern of rich countries becoming richer, and poorer nations staying poor, or becoming poorer."[36] Modern conflicts kill an estimated half a million people each year (300,000 from conflicts, 200,000 from homicides and suicides).[37] According to the Lancet Survey of 2006, there have been 601,027 violent deaths out of 654,965 excess deaths in the Iraq war since March 2003.[38] The ORB (Opinion Research Business) poll of Iraq war casualties estimates a figure of over 1.2 million deaths (1,220,580) since March 2003, the highest number published so far, and outnumbering even the death toll of the recent Rwandan genocide.[39] According to Iraq Body Count, an estimated 82,625 - 90,149 civilian deaths have resulted from the occupation of Iraq since March 2003.[40] The US has only officially counted its own dead (now close to 4,000), but the toll the war was taking on Iraqis was not a matter the Pentagon or any other US government department intended to quantify.[41] There are no official figures of civilian deaths caused by the invasion of Afghanistan (‘Operation Enduring Freedom', since October 2001), but according to a US academic, at least 3,700 and probably closer to 5,000 civilians were killed as a result of U.S. bombing in the first months of the war - quickly surpassing the death toll of the 11 September attacks.[42] Aid groups including U.N. agencies say nearly 2.8 million Iraqis are now uprooted within their country, with more than 1 million displaced Iraqis who lack adequate food and shelter. In addition to those displaced within Iraq, more than 2 million Iraqis have fled the country and are living as refugees abroad.[43] "(S)ince September 11 the Bush administration has used the words "national security" as a shock and awe tactic, blunting the public's willingness to question governmental actions. But even those who have asked questions have rarely found an answer... The Bush administration's disregard for judicial review, its reliance on executive fiat, and its penchant for secrecy limit its accountability. That loss of accountability harms democratic governance and the legal traditions upon which human rights depend. Scrutiny by the judiciary-as well as Congress and the public at large-are crucial to prevent the executive branch from warping fundamental rights beyond recognition... Some courts have failed to apply a simple teaching at the heart of the Magna Carta: "in brief. . .that the king is and shall be below the law."[44] For the period 2003-2006, the United States ranks as the world's largest exporter of arms to developing nations, and regained its place atop the list of arms exporting nations (in 2005 the United States fell behind Russia and France to place third in terms of new arms export agreements concluded with developing nations). In 2006, the United States concluded $10.3 billion - nearly 36 percent of all arms transfer agreements with the developing world (up from $6.2 billion in agreements in 2005).[45] "The United States has many times sent armed forces to take over foreign countries for weeks, years, even decades. But the Bush doctrine is the first to elevate such wars of offense to the status of official policy, and to call "preemptive" (referring to imminent peril) what is actually preventive (referring to longer-term, hypothetical, avoidable peril). This semantic shift is crucial. When prevention of a remote possibility is called preemption, anything goes. CIA caution can be overridden, Al Qaeda connections fabricated, dangers exaggerated-and the United States will have a doctrine to substitute for international law."[46] (U.S.) National military (non-peacekeeping) forces deployed outside of the borders of their own countries totalled about 540,000 in 2005. U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other military bases around the globe alone accounted for 73 percent, or some 394,000 troops. With a combined 117,000 soldiers abroad, Turkey, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia represented another 22 percent.[47] The total of America's military bases in other people's countries in 2005, according to official sources, was 737. Reflecting massive deployments to Iraq and the pursuit of President Bush's strategy of preemptive war, the trend line for numbers of overseas bases continues to go up. Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005 -- mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets -- almost exactly equals Britain's thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.[48] Using data from fiscal year 2005, the Pentagon bureaucrats calculated that its overseas bases were worth at least $127 billion -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic products of most countries -- and an estimated $658.1 billion for all of them, foreign and domestic...[49] Alternatives and Solutions to War According to the Human Development Report (1998), $40 bn could eliminate most forms of poverty in the world - a figure representing 5 percent of the money spent on arms each year.[50] "It seems reasonable to ask whether a resource-acquisition strategy based on global cooperation rather than recurring conflict might not prove more effective in guaranteeing access to critical supplies over the long run. Such a strategy would call for the equitable distribution of the world's existing resource stockpiles in times of acute scarcity... The key to making this strategy work effectively would be the establishment of robust international institutions that could address major resource problems while retaining the confidence of global leaders and the public. Such institutions would be needed to produce an accurate inventory of the world's supplies of critical commodities and to develop mechanisms for the global allocation of these materials in times of extreme scarcity or emergency."[51] "As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, the global human community faces a momentous choice: we can either proceed down the path of intensified resource competition, which will lead to recurring outbreaks of conflict throughout the world, or we can choose to manage global resource stockpiles in a cooperative fashion."[52] "All people should democratically control their own destiny within the borders of their own nation. As the lack of control of their own nation is where anger, and thus the risk of a major war is highest, these shattered people would, after being given formal statehood, be good candidates to be the first allotted adequate industry and access to world markets. For a standard of living much higher than they could ever otherwise have hoped to attain, and with the world guaranteeing the borders of their nation, these embattled souls could make a positive contribution to a peaceful and just new world order by recognition of (national statehood) and publicly and actually abandoning terrorism. As the standard of living rises throughout the world under the above-outlined rules of development, calmer and wiser heads shall govern those nations and terrorists will eventually fade into history." - Dr J.W. Smith
"The United States
and its allies can stamp out specific groups by force and bribery. But in the
longer run, the structural arrangements that replicate a grossly unequal world
have to be redesigned, as we did at the Bretton Woods conference after World
War II, so that markets working within the new framework produce more equitable
results. Historians looking back a century from now will say that the time to
have begun was now." - Robert Hunter Wade.[53]
[2] Monty G. Marshall. Major Episodes of Political Violence: 1946-2006 (Center for Systemic Peace, September 2007) [3] Measuring systemic peace, Global Conflict Trends, Centre for Systemic Peace (http://members.aol.com/cspmgm/conflict.htm, accessed April 2008) see figure 2. [4] Dr J. W. Smith. Why? The deeper history behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America (Institute for Economic Democracy, 2002). See conclusion: Give full rights to all people and terrorism disappears, p 140. [5] S. Brian Willson. ‘Who are the REAL terrorists?' (Institute for Policy Research and Development, 1999) [6] Robert Hunter Wade. ‘America's Empire Rules an Unbalanced World' (Counterpunch.org, 3 January 2002) [7] Michael T. Klare. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (Henry Holt, New York 2001) p 6. [8] Ibid, p xii. [9] Ibid, p 8. [10] Ibid, p 10. [11] Ibid, p 24. [12] Ibid, p 214. [13] President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961 (Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960) p. 1035- 1040 [14] Ivan Eland. The Empire Has No Clothes: Defense-Contract Reform Key to a Restrained Foreign Policy (Anti-War.com, 24 March 2008) [15] America's Defense Monitor: A conversation with Noam Chomsky (Center for Defence Monitor, 1996) [16] Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (Allen Lane, 2008) p 115. [17] Petter Stålenheim, Catalina Perdomo and Elisabeth Sköns. SIPRI Yearbook 2007: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. Chapter 8. Military expenditure (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Oxford University Press, June 2007) [18] Petter Stålenheim, Catalina Perdomo and Elisabeth Sköns. SIPRI Yearbook 2007: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. Chapter 8. Military expenditure (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Oxford University Press, June 2007) [19] Petter Stålenheim, Catalina Perdomo and Elisabeth Sköns. SIPRI Yearbook 2007: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. Chapter 8. Military expenditure (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Oxford University Press, June 2007) [20] Christopher Hellman. The Runaway Military Budget (Printed in the FCNL Washington Newsletter, Friends Committee on National Legislation, March 2006) [21] U.S. Military Spending vs. the World (Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, 22 February 2008) [22] The FY 2009 Pentagon Spending Request - Discretionary (The Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Page accessed March 2008) [23] Ian Traynor. The Privatisation of War (The Guardian, 10 December 2003) [24] Adam Easton. War privatisation talks in Warsaw (BBC News, 27 April 2006) [25] Jeremy Scahill. Our mercenaries in Iraq (Counterpunch.org, 25 January 2007) [26] Katrina Vanden Heuvel. Ending War for Profit (The Nation, October 2007) [27] Naomi Klein. Iraq is not America's to sell (The Guardian, 7 November 2003) [28] Naomi Klein. Privatization in Disguise (The Nation, 10 April 2003) [29] Naomi Klein. Free Trade is War (The Nation, 11 September 2003) [30] Mark Mazzetti. ‘Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat' (New York Times, 24 September 2006) [31] Small Arms Survey 2001: Profiling the Problem (Small Arms Survey, Oxford 2001) [32] Small Arms Survey 2001: Profiling the Problem (Small Arms Survey, Oxford 2001) [33] Ordinance and Munitions Forecast 2000 (Forecast International, 2000) [34] Richard F. Grimmett. Congressional Research Service Report to Congress (Congressional Research Service, 16 August 2001) [35] Stephen Staples et al. ‘The WTO and the Globalization of the Arms Industry' (World Policy Institute, December 1999) [36] Gideon Burrows. The No-Nonsense Guide to The Arms Trade (New Internationalist / Verso books, 2002) p 75. [37] International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA): Small Arms are Weapons of Mass Destruction (accessed March 2008) GET BETTERSOURCE [38] Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts. "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey" (The Lancet, PDF report, October 11, 2006) [39] "More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered" (Opinion Research Business, PDF report, September 2007) [40] Documented Civilian Deaths from Violence (Iraq Body Count, accessed April 2008) <http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/> [41] Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg. What is the real death toll in Iraq? (The Guardian, 19 March 2008) [42] ‘Afghanistan's civilian deaths mount' (BBC News, 3 January 2002) [43] ‘UN, other groups say nearly 2.8 million displaced in Iraq' (USA Today, 1 April 2008) [44] Alison Parker and Jamie Fellner. ‘Above the Law: Executive Power after September 11 in the United States' - from World Report 2004 (Human Rights Watch, January 2004) [45] Richard F. Grimmett. ‘Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1999-2006' (Congressional Research Service, 26 September 2007) [46] Todd Gitlin. America's Age of Empire: The Bush Doctrine (Mother Jones, January/February 2003 Issue) [47] Michael Renner. Peacekeeping, a Study in Contradictions (Worldwatch Institute, 20 February 2008) [48] Chalmers Johnson. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic - American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books, February 2007) [49] Chalmers Johnson. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic - American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books, February 2007) [50] ‘Human Development Report 1998: Consumption for Human Development' (United Nations Human Development Program, 1998) [51] Michael T. Klare. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (Henry Holt, New York 2001) p 223. [52] Michael T. Klare. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (Henry Holt, New York 2001) p 225. [53] Robert Hunter Wade. ‘America's Empire Rules an Unbalanced World' (Counterpunch.org, 3 January 2002) |
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