A terrifying truth. War On Terror, Inc.

[Rory Winter]

A terrifying truth: War On Terror, Inc.
Posted by RMS on MEDIALENS on March 26, 2008
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1206574108.html



War On Terror, Inc: Corporate Profiteering From the Politics of Fear by Solomon Hughes, (Verso, £16.99), Morning Star review

TOM MELLEN learns how the 'security-industrial complex' is cashing on our politicians' promises to protect us from harm.

THE words "war on terror" have slowly but surely been exorcised from the government's vocabulary, but no new newspeak has yet been cooked up to replace them.

Saatchi and Saatchi chief Kevin Roberts attempted a rebrand, but all he could come up with was "global struggle against violent extremism," which never caught on, perhaps because Jacqui Smith started using it.

The problem, as Solomon Hughes makes crystal clear in War on Terror, Inc, is not one of bodged presentation.

New Labour is simply too deeply compromised by its exploitation of the politics of fear at home and its disasterous military interventions abroad to get out of it with a bit of expensive spin.

Blair may be heading to greener pastures across the pond and the US is already pretending that Bush is a distant memory, but we all still face being locked up without trial.

Civilians, not to mention soldiers, are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan and teachers' pet David Miliband has cemented his new Labour credentials by launching a spirited defence of liberal interventionism, just when you were hoping that it was going out of style.

So, tolerating business as usual means that it is only a matter of time before our boys are called upon to, once again, wage asymmetric warfare in the service of Miliband's muscular humanitarianism - and all in the name of the national interest.

Hughes shows that a decisive break with the war on terror world view can only come when the British people form a government that wages war on the military-industrial complex itself rather than underdeveloped, impoverished former colonies.

He argues that, since the collapse of the USSR, the military-industrial complex which so concerned Eisenhower has evolved into what he terms the security-industrial complex, an unholy alliance of prison privateers, mercenary outfits, war contractors such as Halliburton and the political elites of the US and Britain.

War has always been big business, but never before have the war corporations set the policy agenda of governments so brazenly, Hughes shows, detailing with frightening detail the existence of a powerful business lobby with a vested interest in military adventures and authoritarian "homeland security" policies intent on encouraging the war on terror, regardless of its manifest failings.

One aspect of the security-industrial complex is the revolving door taking officials and politicians into the security industry itself and the results of Hughes's excavations on this front are startling.

Jeremy Greenstock, who was Britain's special representative in Iraq until March 2004, has recently joined the security printing firm De La Rue, which is one of the many firms that is expected to make a tidy profit from the ID cards scheme.

And former home secretary David Blunkett is now an advisor to Entrust, a Texas-based security firm that is bidding for work on the same scheme, while former Tory minister Nicholas Soames has moved to the board of Aegis, a top new mercenary firm.

Hughes reveals that arch neocon Dick Cheney travelled to Britain as CEO of Halliburton in April 2000 to open the joint US-UK Conference on Privatising Military Installations, Assets, Operations and Services, which looked at ways to "blur the line between military and contractor."

Cheney declared: "Our British colleagues are far ahead of us in the US in the extent to which they have adopted changes in culture, attitude and style of operation that are required for successful privatisation efforts."

Hughes puts this down to the fact that, since Labour ministers were not lumbered with a traditional, right-wing "patriotic" political past, they paradoxically felt more able to break with military traditions and speed up the privatisation of the armed forces, at the same time as sending these forces into battle with alarming frequency.

There is no happy ending. As Hughes notes, unease and anger over aspects of the war on terror have not yet been enough to bring about a sea-change in British policy.

"The first step towards unravelling the influence of the security-industrial complex is the recognition that it exists," Hughes observes.

His book provides us with plenty of damning evidence. Now it is up to sincere patriots, the peace movement, trade unions and socialists to pull together and develop a common strategy so that we can begin the unravelling in earnest.