Ken Silverstein
Verso, London (£19.00) and New York ($25.00), 2000
Ken Silverstein is co-editor of CounterPunch, a very good radical – left radical – newsletter in Washington (http://www. counterpunch.org/). This book is a group of essays centred round a central theme rather than an attempt to encompass the whole area of the relationship between the state and private sector suppliers of military equipment, personnel and, increasingly, military force abroad. That said, by the end of the book the reader has received a pretty thorough introduction to the major themes – and a lot of interesting and entertaining bits and pieces en route.
So we get three chapters on the ex-Nazi arms dealers who worked for the US; a section on miscellaneous mercenary operations, including short sections on some UK firms; a chapter on Alexander Haig’s post-government career in this field; and a chapter on the revolving door between the Pentagon and the arms corporations.
The private sector has become increasingly involved in the use of military force abroad (a) because of greater deniability – the same motive which produced ‘private’ spooks in the intelligence field, – and (b) because of the political sensitivity of American casualties abroad. If someone is going to come home in a body bag, better it be a mercenary than a citizen.
The cynicism of the American arms companies is breathtaking. Having lost the Soviet ‘threat’ they simply commissioned the invention a bunch of other threats which, hitherto, hadn’t been threats at all. This task falls upon the intellectual pilot fish swimming with the sharks and Silverstein gives us a chapter on the Center for Security Policy, one of the many ‘think tanks’ working in Washington, funded by the arms companies, creating ‘threats’ sufficient to justify the Pentagon’s share of the American tax base. But it is hard work. Just as the animal rights people and the eco-warriors are not really an adequate substitute for MI5’s loss of the the KGB and GRU, so narco-terrorism and North Korea – barely able to feed its population but apparently about to rain missiles down on the US – are not adequate substitutes for the red menace. But who cares? The Pentagon will fund military programmes even when the kit demonstrably does not work (Silverstein provides a belter of an example); and the whole stinking barrel of pork is kept filled by the simple device of the arms companies bribing the politicians with the tax-payers’ money. This is beyond parody. The film satire Wag the Dog, about the President who gets a film producer to fake a war for him – the Albanians are coming! – doesn’t even get close.
Partly because this has no sources, footnotes or documentation of any kind, it feels rather a light-weight book. It isn’t, in fact, but it would have been massively improved with the documentation in. Why do publishers hate footnotes? Who does Verso think is going to buy a book like this? I would guess at least 90% of the sales will be to people who not only are used to footnotes but positively like them! And it cannot be about space and costs: the documentation could have been accommodated simply by reducing the book’s generous page margins a little.
A section of the book can be read on the Website of the Center for Defense Information.