Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006
$75.00 (US), £37.99 (UK), h/b
This is an interesting and timely book and it is a great pity it is so expensive. Put out as a paperback and maybe with a less academic-sounding title, this would sell. Little of it is intellectually taxing and any one who reads a British broadsheet newspaper will cope with this. Professor Hossein-Zadeh has written an account of the American military-industrial complex (MIC from here on for convenience) and some of its recent activities.(9)
The author’s thesis is that the Pentagon and its allies and dependants are now engaged in what he calls parasitic imperialism:
‘When an inordinately large military establishment of a world power reaches such high levels of influence that it can manipulate the foreign policy of that superpower for its own ends, militarism can be called military imperialism – or parasitic imperialism’.(p. 28) (10)
In other words, the MIC is running the show, generating conflict and enemies to justify taking – on the author’s calculations – 41.6% of US tax dollars and distributing large amounts of that to the shareholders of the military corporations. This must be the greatest rip-off in world history and hardly anyone is willing to call it by its name.
And, being America, none of this is hidden. As the author shows, the biggest arms corporation, Lockheed Martin, makes the biggest donations to the members of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Senate Committee on Government Affairs. (p. 17) As a congressman said on videotape to John DeLorean during an FBI corruption ‘sting’ in the 1980s, ‘Money talks and bullshit walks’. And in this case it’s taxpayers’ money, given to the arms corporations by politicians who then get a small piece of it back from them.
He sees the current situation as the outcome of struggle between factions of the American ruling class, between what he calls neo-liberal multilateralism and neo-conservative unilateralism. The multilateralists were exemplified by the Trilateral Commission who, in the 1970s, during Jimmy Carter’s term, had a go at creating a – here comes the unavoidable phrase – new world order, based on cutting arms spending and détente with the Soviet bloc.
‘But the Trilateralists’s honeymoon was cut short by powerful political rivals in the opposing faction of the U.S. ruling class. Powerful beneficiaries of war and militarism (the military-industrial complex) united with nationalist proponents of unilateralism and economic protection, moved swiftly to undermine the plans and projections of the multilateralists.’ (p. 67) (11)
JFK was trying the same thing as Jimmy Carter: reduce arms expenditure and have a less ruinous competition with the Soviet bloc. Kennedy got killed; and Carter got screwed electorally by an alliance of spooks, the military and their intellectual flunkies who recreated the ‘Soviet threat’ (Team B, the ‘Soviet brigade’ on Cuba, etc.).
The author’s analysis distinguishes him from others who see a neo-con cabal currently running things. He shows them merely fronting and generating rationales for the economic interests of the MIC. He is describing a kind of corporatist state, something vividly illustrated by the Richard Cummings piece on Lockheed, referred to in this issue (see ‘View from the bridge’), and shown in great detail here.
There are chapters on waste and the mind-boggling lack of accountability where Pentagon spending is concerned. He quotes Donald Rumsfeld, speaking on the day before 9/11, admitting that Pentagon accounting had lost track of $2.3 trillion. (And boy, did that get lost in the dust clouds of the next day’s events!) And there is a very good analysis of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq which he shows was ‘driven by an alliance of….the military-industrial complex and the hard-line Zionists proponents of “greater Israel” in the “promised land”.’
This is a fine mixture of analysis and detailed research, as well as being an entertaining read.
Notes
- It would be more accurate to call it the military-industrial-intelligence-political complex but the military-industrial complex is the term we all know and use; and it’s clumsy enough without adding to it.
- This is what Juan Bosch called Pentagonism in 1968 in his little book of that name referred to in the previous Lobster. Bosch’s book is not in the author’s bibliography.
- We have been here before. This is what Carl Oglesby called the war between the Yankees and the Cowboys. See Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1976).