http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062305X.shtmlWhen 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.
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