War, What’s It Good For? Absolutely Nothing

War, What’s It Good For? Absolutely Nothing. This song, written and performed by Edwin Starr (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-2pNCZiNk) during the height of the Vietnam War, captured the sentiment of millions worldwide. It represented the repulsion of the mostly young people in the antiwar movement to the daily horrors of that war, and the desire to end the use of war in the pursuit of professed “national interests”. It was also clearly expressed in another song of the era, “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3_0GqPvr4U ).

The only problem is that these heartfelt songs failed to get at the causes behind the war in Vietnam and other wars the US would wage as part of the “Cold” War (or perhaps more accurately WWIII). In doing so, they glossed over both the questions of who benefits from war (it turns out war is good for somethings and somebodies) and what we need to do to “give peace a chance”, since peace is NOT simply the absence of war.

War is definitely not good for children and other living things. First and foremost, the current war in the Ukraine is not good for the Ukrainian people, whose soldiers and civilians are being killed and whose country is being devastated; it is not good for the young Russian soldiers, sent to fight and die in a foreign country without knowing why (just like the American boys, who were sent to fight and die Vietnam) because if they knew why they wouldn’t go, nor is it good for the Russian civilians on whom the sanctions imposed by the US and NATO will have the greatest impact.

And, it is not good for the rest of us. Most immediately, the fallout from the war will include increases in the price of food and energy that will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and nations in the Global South. In the longer run, increased spending for war will divert resources from meeting people’s needs everywhere. A truly repugnant example is the looming cut to the US’s meager commitment for expanding global access to the COVID-19 vaccine. More money for war precludes money to defend us all from the plague.

So, who is war good for?

In the current situation even though the US is not a participant – wait a minute, that’s not accurate. When you provide arms to one side in a war and provide them with training and intelligence and when you impose draconian sanctions on the other, can you still claim that you are not a participant? I think not.

Reload: In the current situation, even though the US is not yet shooting down Russian planes to enforce a “no fly zone”, big corporations are lining up at the government trough for more billion-dollar contracts to supply not only the US military, but those of our allies in NATO, not to mention such wonderful democracies as Saudi Arabia, whose war in Yemen had produced the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, prior to the war in Ukraine, with 24.1 million people needing humanitarian aid and tens of thousands facing starvation, according the United Nations. Didn’t see much about that in the press in the last month, did we?

As I write, the Biden administration is about to ask Congress for at least $30 billion more in military spending, which Congress, not to be outdone, is likely to increase. The US is government is also ramping up its plans to upgrade the its ICBMs at the estimated cost of $364,000,000,000 before cost overruns. (Check out my Nov. 1 ,2021 post, Playing Russian Roulette with a Nuclear Holocaust).

Some of $$$ are to replace the weapons that are headed for the Ukraine, so that it can defend itself. But, given that some of the forces in the Ukrainian military are neo-fascists, one question that should be raised is what happens if these forces get their hands on the weapons the US is providing. Didn’t the US provide weapons to the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, which later ended up in the hands of the Taliban? It’s called “blowback”, and when you are THE major arms supplier to the world, which the US is, it means more profits for the “Masters of War” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEmI_FT4YHU), regardless of who ends up with the guns. BTW, the weapons being supplied to Ukraine are far, far more deadly than your father’s M-16s.

So, to begin the weapons industry stands to benefit “bigly” from this and every other war no matter which side the US comes down on, and it is almost axiomatic that if there is a war anywhere, the US will come down on one side or the other. It has to do with American “interests” (see below).

But the Masters of War are not alone. As the current war illustrates, the bottom lines of big businesses not directly related to the war industries also benefit from war. Just take the fossil fuel industry (or other extractive industries) who can raise prices on their products and reap massive profits, because of the “shortage” of these commodities while their “costs” of production didn’t necessarily rise. (Note, this is analogous to what happened with the “supply chain” inflation as a result of the pandemic.)

Look for runaway inequality to get a big boost from the war in Ukraine, as it has from the pandemic. The wealth of America’s billionaires increased $1.7 trillion (1/8^th of which went to one man – Elon Musk) from March of 2020 to March of 2022. It seems that big business and their wealthy owners never met a crisis they couldn’t exploit. While a few members of Congress are proposing something akin to an excessive profits tax, Republicans and their fellow corporate Dems will make sure these proposals go nowhere.

But there is one more way that the capitalist class in the US and their Western European allies benefit from wars and it gives us a much better understanding of why we have wars and how to resist. To put it simply, the wars they support involve maintaining and expanding their ability to exploit the people and resources of countries beyond their borders. To understand war in last 200 years, it is necessary to see the economics behind the guns and how the conflicts between dominant capitalist empires and those aspiring to replace or limit them have shaped our history. Put simply, it is necessary to understand imperialism.

Today’s dominant empire is the United States with its junior partners in Western Europe and East Asia. It is being challenged by China and its junior partner, Russia. To understand the war in Ukraine and global conflicts in 2022, we need go back and look at the history of how the US became what I will refer to as The Empire of the Good (as opposed to those it has deemed the Evil Empires) and how it has, through warfare, created the most extensive empire the world has ever seen and what the costs of that empire are.

FYI: Here is what the Biden administration wants to spend almost $1 trillion on: 

·         $773 billion for the Pentagon specifically;

·         $34.4 billion for nuclear weapon modernization;

·         $24.7 billion for missile “defense” programs;

·         $24.5 billion for the space force program;

·         $6.9 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative (aka boosting U.S. military presence in Europe); and 

·         $1.8 billion for expanding U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific region.”

 

Next up, “From the beginning: How the roots of the American Empire were laid well before 1776”.

In the meanwhile, enjoy the music.