The corporate and economic reasons for war

We seem to have wrangled and jousted over every nuance of the moral and strategic aspects of the latest war in Lebanon. Wars seem to come and go like dark clouds, their origins as hard to fathom as the weather. They seem to be woven from many fibres of historical injustice and disagreement. They seem to be an unstoppable aspect of human nature.

Yet plainly things are not what they seem to be. The story of our lives, the story of the serial wars since the end of the 19th century is but a narrative - a narrative that carefully avoids the underlying corporate and economic reasons for war. The details are hidden in plain sight, but are never presented as a continuum. If the media did their journalistic duty, we would see that all the wars are but pieces of one continuous whole.

The shocking thing is that none of this ever had to be; a fact that we know in our hearts to be true. No dispute ever had to spread beyond the bounds of its small geographical locality. No dispute ever had to fly the conference table and take to arms. War is the greatest card-trick in history.

Crucial to this trick are the race and religion cards. Once these jokers are played, it's all over for clear thinking, and we find ourselves "through the looking glass". In order to proceed, we must make a superhuman effort to ignore Jew v Arab, Muslim v infidel and deity v deity.

We must clear our heads of the noise which is daily foisted upon us, a noise so all pervasive that we are addicted to it. Like all addictions, it will be our downfall unless we kick the habit.

So what might war look like to the uncluttered mind?

War for profit - the grotesque face of globalism

• The impetus for war is wealth and power.
• The financiers with vast wealth and power have a thirst that can never be quenched - an appetite that can never be sated - because their rapaciousness only serves to make them the most insecure people on Earth.
• Their game-plan is a strategy which uses religion, race, culture and manufactured hatred for its own ends. Life is not sacred. This is the oh-so familiar amorality of the corporate mindset which demands "profit über alles".
• Iraq was but one dot-point in an unbroken stream of war-for-profit. Cui bono - who gains? Always follow the money.
• Money - the monetary economy - is made out of thin air. It is just an idea - a way to organise humanity. Our modern economy is enabled by the availability of a potent free energy source - irreplaceable compact fossil sunshine.
• Energy alone fulfils the dreams that money promises. In order to dream the American Dream, you must stay asleep. If the sleeper wakes, the money-dream will disappear.
• The looming shortage of easy, high quality oil is the trigger for the financiers' march to global fascism, because it has galvanised them into collective action.
• Although the financiers are spread across the globe, they concentrate their influence through control of the US Government, the defence industry and mainstream media. The US is their powerful spearhead and the US treasury is their well.
• Even the most moderate US general is compromised by the fact that the US Department of Defense is the largest single-entity user of high quality oil in the world. The US war machine would be useless without it. Catch-22.

The Middle East - ground zero

Obtain a map of the Middle East and Central Asia. Mark in the oilfields, wellheads, pipelines, US bases, social and religious demographics if you like. Now you have the grand chessboard of Brezinsky and Kissinger.

(Courtesy Asia Times)

See how the most sensible, pragmatic, economic and ergonomic gambit for the withdrawal of sweet Iraqi oil is to gather and pipe it straight to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, from where it can be shipped westward. It's that simple. This has been the dream of western industrialists since the potential of the oilfields was realised so long ago. The port city of Haifa is the preferred embarkation point.

There was such a pipeline, the Mosul-Haifa pipe, built in the 1930s, but this was disabled during Israel's 1948 war. Even if the old small pipes could be resurrected, they would not have the capacity to quench our modern thirst for sweet oil.

Henry Kissinger fathered the proposal for a new 42" pipe in 1975. Pipeline constructors Bechtel asked Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate with Saddam Hussein about the project in 1983-84, but in the end Saddam wouldn't play ball. We all knew what a shifty character Hussein was. We knew that because we had been repeatedly told what to think about him.

All the happenings in the Middle East have some connection to this simple notion of safely bringing vast quantities of the world's most energy-rich oil to the most convenient port of embarkation on the Mediterranean.

To divide and conquer - turn up the noise

In order to play the race and religion jokers, it is necessary to ply people with a childish, almost irresistible notion - the need to feel superior. Arrogance is a hallmark of the insecure.

Group people according to genetics, religion or imaginary geographical borders. Identify each group with a name. Give each group a symbol, maybe a flag. Glorify each group's history, being careful to leave out the bad bits which might otherwise spoil the trick.

Then convince each group that it is "special". The need to feel "special" is a self-fulfilling pathological urge. Having yielded to this deception, some groups go to a great deal of trouble to emphasise their differences to their neighbours. Then they are compelled to fossilise their brains and turn their hearts to stone in order to cope with their new-found feelings of insecurity.

And where do these feelings of insecurity come from? Naturally they are the result of being isolated from one's neighbours. What a cheap trick.

Now the profiteers can cut the cake. Now they have tin soldiers who will further their economic agenda - and do it cheaply. The soldiers often count their lives as being worth no more than a piece of coloured cloth. Oh Glory! Those financiers just LOVE a bargain.

The world is their cake. No matter how it is divided, the financiers' cream filling joins the segments: governments, intelligence, industry, defence - because economic and budgetary matters penetrate and subvert every seen and unseen aspect of public and private life. Unfortunately, that economic cream turned rancid long, long ago.

Message in a bottle - history's whistleblowers

Although we rail against the weapons manufacturers and other corporate entities who lobby to advance the cause of war, there is a more subterranean layer of investors and bankers who wield the real influence and garner the greatest share of profit. For the last hundred years, they have enjoyed an immunity which is seldom questioned, because they themselves wrote the rules of the corporate game.

Lying beneath layers of cross-ownership, hiding in the tangle of paperwork, live the troglodytes - a handful of men whose vast family fortunes and impeccable credentials conceal the sordid reality of their history and power.

In his book All Honorable Men, James Martin, head of Roosevelt's Economic Warfare Division, described the wartime financiers as termites who live in the very foundations of civilisation. He used the termite metaphor deliberately, because their machinations cannot stand the light of day. Other whistleblowers down the ages have left similar clues:

Aristotle (350 BC): “The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.”

Frederich Von Haytec, economist: “To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.”

Benjamin Disraeli (British PM): “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the US since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

Henry Ford: “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

Lord Acton: “The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”

Lord Acton's observations bring us to the crux of the problem, but how do we confront a parasite which to most of us is as diffuse and insubstantial as smoke? The answer is to peel back the layers of corporate secrecy and let the sunlight of understanding be our disinfectant. Then watch the termites run. They are few and we are many.

Sly-boys of the war-for-profit gang

The Central Intelligence Agency of the USA was created in the aftermath of World War II. Key positions are occupied by Wall Street bankers and lawyers, and members of the Council of Foreign Relations. The CIA has relentlessly enabled the hegemony of influential financiers, in both the foreign and domestic spheres. Above all, the CIA frequently operates free of the constraints of government oversight.

The CIA's first notable "success" was the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq, democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. Mossadeq's sin was to demand more oil revenues for his people's welfare. Not only did Iran receive a pittance for its precious resource, but Iranians paid more for gasoline than the wealthy British, so Mossadeq moved to nationalise Iran's oil industry. The CIA struck back and the rest is history - a history for which we still pay. All hail the cunning of Anglo-Iranian Oil (now BP). Do Americans note that this caper may not have been exactly in their national interest?

How cheap was that oil really? Obviously the global financiers reaped the benefit, but the citizens of the United States and Iran inherited the fallout. In corporate speak, we call that "externalising the costs".

L. Fletcher Prouty (Colonel, US Air Force, Retired) roughed out the basic modus operandi: "The power of the (CIA) Team derives from its vast intragovernmental undercover infrastructure and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including foreign and domestic publishing houses. The Secret Team has very close affiliations with elements of power in more than three-score foreign countries and is able when it chooses to topple governments, to create governments, and to influence governments almost anywhere in the world."

A bloodless little skirmish Down Under

We Australians had our "Mossadeq moment" back in the mid 1970s. At that time, our bean-counters calculated that a $1 investment in Australian minerals and energy would return a cool $1,425, for a total value of $5.7 trillion - a truly astronomical amount in the currency of those days (Parliamentary broadcast). The rights to this national treasure were largely in the hands of overseas interests, so the socialist Whitlam Government set out to compete for a larger nationally owned share, with money borrowed from OPEC countries (the oil producers had quite a lot of spare change in those days).

This immense treasure house of Australian resources was far too great a gift to be granted to Australians, so the CIA's old-boy network swung into action through their sympathisers within the public service and Australia's wealthy elite. It was all too easy to lay a trap to discredit and topple the fiscally naive socialists. The ATM turned out to be a fake. The media shills soothed us back to sleep. The global financiers breathed a sigh of relief.

Although it was a bloodless coup, that sly act of economic warfare established the relationship that defines our role as America's sidekick today. Our Australian government helped to justify the destruction of Iraq. Somehow, it supported the liquidation of 655,000 consumers of our wheat. Who gains from that? Most importantly, who will pay the price in the end?

As a rough analogy, consider the destruction of the great storehouse of ammunition at Base Falcon, just outside Baghdad. Was that a victory for the Iraqi insurgency? No, the insurgents ran a poor second. The clear winners are the termites who profited from the supply of the ammunition. It is impossible for them to lose a war.

To the war-for-profit gang, Santa comes at a time of their own choosing. For their sakes, we stack the sleigh with bombs while singing their moronic carols. Whose chimney will be next?

Smoke and mirrors

The war on terror is an appliance that the sly-boys use on their "friends". Not actually war, it is the suggested threat - the taser to goad recalcitrant politicians into actions that are not in the best interests of their constituents.

To the extent that they are even consciously involved, I no longer see our Federal politicians and bureaucrats as being leaders, thinkers and enablers. I see them only as extras in a kind of diversion - a comedy to attract our attention away from the main business of plunder, pillage and profit.

A comedy in which the cheapest becomes the most expensive; for deals in which the actual repayments are deferred to our grandchildren's account.