Give peace a chance: Don’t believe the war profiteers

Vereshchagin’s painting The Apotheosis of War (1871) came to be admired as one of the earliest artistic expressions of pacifism – Public Domain

by Roy Eidelson

Last month I had the opportunity to share some thoughts at a Divest Philly from the War Machine event, hosted by Wooden Shoe Books and sponsored by World Beyond WarCode PinkVeterans for Peace, and other anti-war groups. Below are my remarks, slightly edited for clarity. My thanks to everyone involved. 

In late May, Vice President Mike Pence was the commencement speaker at West Point. In part, he told the graduating cadets this: “It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen…And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win. The American people expect nothing less.”

What Pence didn’t mention that day is why he could be so sure that this will come to pass. Or who the primary beneficiaries will be, if or when it does. Because the winners won’t be the American people, who see their taxes go to missiles instead of healthcare and education. Nor will they be the soldiers themselves—some of whom will return in flag-draped caskets while many more sustain life-altering physical and psychological injuries. The winners also won’t be the citizens of other countries who experience death and displacement on a horrific scale from our awesome military might. And our planet’s now-fragile climate won’t come out on top either, since the Pentagon is the single largest oil consumer in the world.

No, the spoils will go to our massive and multifaceted war machine. The war machine is comprised of companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, among others, that make billions of dollars each year from war, war preparations, and arms sales. In fact, the U.S. government pays Lockheed alone more each year than it provides in funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department, and the Interior Department combined. The war machine also includes the CEOs of these defense contractors, who personally take in tens of millions of dollars annually, and the many politicians in Washington who help secure their jobs by collectively accepting millions of dollars in contributions from the defense industry—roughly evenly split between both major parties. And let’s not forget the retired politicians and retired military officers, who travel the pot-of-gold pipeline to become highly paid board members and spokespersons for these same companies.

Vice-President Pence also didn’t mention to the cadets that the U.S. military budget today exceeds that of the next seven largest countries combined—an enthusiastic display of Congressional bipartisanship at its very worst. Nor did he note that we’re the largest international seller of major weapons in the world, with ongoing efforts to promote even bigger markets for U.S. arms companies in countries run by ruthless, repressive autocrats. That’s how it came to pass last August, for example, that Saudi Arabia used an expensive Lockheed laser-guided bomb to blow up a bus in Yemen, killing 40 young boys who were on a school trip.

Given these realities, I’d like to offer my perspective—as a psychologist—on a question that has never really been more timely: How is it that the war profiteers, card-carrying members of the so-called 1%, continue to thrive despite all the harm and misery they cause for so many? We know that the 1%—the self-interested very rich and powerful—set the priorities of many of our elected officials. We also know that they exert considerable influence over the mainstream media regarding which narratives are promoted and which are obscured. But in my own work, what’s most important—and what too often goes unrecognized—are the propaganda strategies they use to prevent us from realizing what’s gone wrong, who’s to blame, and how we can make things better. And nowhere is this more apparent or more consequential than when it comes to the one-percenters who run our war machine. In my next three posts, I describe these strategies.

US Military Is a Bigger Polluter than As Many As 140 Countries – Shrinking This War Machine Is a Must

San Francisco Youth Climate Strike – March 15, 2019. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

By Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher and Patrick Bigger – The Conversation

24 Jun 2019 – The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.

Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.

In 2017, the US military bought about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted more than 25,000 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide by burning those fuels. The US Air Force purchased US$4.9 billion worth of fuel, and the navy US$2.8 billion, followed by the army at US$947m and the Marines at US$36m.

It’s no coincidence that US military emissions tend to be overlooked in climate change studies. It’s very difficult to get consistent data from the Pentagon and across US government departments. In fact, the United States insisted on an exemption for reporting military emissions in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This loophole was closed by the Paris Accord, but with the Trump administration due to withdraw from the accord in 2020, this gap will will return.

Our study is based on data retrieved from multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to the US Defense Logistics Agency, the massive bureaucratic agency tasked with managing the US military’s supply chains, including its hydrocarbon fuel purchases and distribution.

The US military has long understood that it isn’t immune from the potential consequences of climate change – recognising it as a “threat multiplier” that can exacerbate other risks. Many, though not all, military bases have been preparing for climate change impacts like sea level rise. Nor has the military ignored its own contribution to the problem. As we have previously shown, the military has invested in developing alternative energy sources like biofuels, but these comprise only a tiny fraction of spending on fuels.

The American military’s climate policy remains contradictory. There have been attempts to “green” aspects of its operations by increasing renewable electricity generation on bases, but it remains the single largest institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world. It has also locked itself into hydrocarbon-based weapons systems for years to come, by depending on existing aircraft and warships for open-ended operations.

Not green, but less, military

Climate change has become a hot-button topic on the campaign trail for the 2020 presidential election. Leading Democratic candidates, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, and members of Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for major climate initiatives like the Green New Deal. For any of that to be effective, the US military’s carbon bootprint must be addressed in domestic policy and international climate treaties.

Our study shows that action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine. There are few activities on Earth as environmentally catastrophic as waging war. Significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget and shrinking its capacity to wage war would cause a huge drop in demand from the biggest consumer of liquid fuels in the world.

It does no good tinkering around the edges of the war machine’s environmental impact. The money spent procuring and distributing fuel across the US empire could instead be spent as a peace dividend, helping to fund a Green New Deal in whatever form it might take. There are no shortage of policy priorities that could use a funding bump. Any of these options would be better than fuelling one of the largest military forces in history.

– Benjamin Neimark – Senior Lecturer, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University
– Oliver Belcher – Assistant Professor of Geography, Durham University
– Patrick Bigger Lecturer of Human Geography, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University

Article by Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger is from Transcend Media Services July 2, 2019; originally published on theconversation.com July 1, 2019. Creative Commons License.

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Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says UGH! Did you hear about the military extravaganza in Washington DC yesterday? What did that do for the environment? What did it do for the nation’s image? It sure costs a lot of taxpayer dollars to portray the country as the world’s greatest bully! While you’re here, click this link for some of the most important photos you’ve ever seen.

Commentary is by Kathie MM and Pegean.

When will they ever learn?

by Kathie MM

I cannot even say those words (“When will they ever learn?”) without Pete Seeger’s ballad, “Where have all the flowers gone,” flooding my brain. We had such optimism in the sixties, despite the vile and catastrophic assassinations of JFK , MLK,, and RFK, such hope that people would study war no more.  But the current era is more bloodthirsty and terrifying than ever as the government, the people behind the government, the arms industry, the NRA, and other war profiteers promote and benefit from deadly weapons and the sacking of lands far from our shores.

As is typical of bullies, those responsible for sending our young men and women to kill civilians (that’s who almost all the victims are) refuse to take responsibility for their devastating assaults on human beings and environments.  If the power brokers learned any lessons from Vietnam, it was how better to cover up dirty deeds and blame their victims for the violence unleashed upon them.

The Sacking of Falujah: A People’s History by Ross Caputi (a frequent guest author on Engaging Peace), Richard Hil, and  Donna Mulhearn takes you behind the scenes of a more recent major bloodletting by the U.S. The book  is not only engrossing, but dares to speak truth to power, to describe events as experienced at Falujah not only by the three authors but by dozens of Iraqis who suffered from the second invasion of Iraq and its endlessly deadly aftermath.

Reading this book will not only provide you with hitherto unavailable information about the sacking of Falujah by the US and “Coalition Forces” but also about the events that led up to it—events that the US government is not eager to share or take responsibility for—and the role of that sacking and related events in the rise of ISIS. It will get you thinking about sociocide and urbacide, and information wars. It may also motivate you to think more about our government’s current rhetoric concerning “enemies” in other parts of the world and its threats regarding the selected enemies of today’s regime. You know who the current targets are. Can you ask your Congresspeople to resist complicity?

To view a video of my interview with Ross Caputi about The Sacking of Falujah, go to https://youtu.be/H7KatbFAI6U and send us your comments on this and all engaging peace posts.