defense industry

The Arms Trade and Drug Lords – Going Underground

MatthewHoh Interviews, War and Conflict , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Update: Andrew Cockburn’s current article in Harper’s Magazine is an absolutely must read. I’ve not read a better summation of Saudi Arabian involvement, and the US government cover-up of the Saudi role in 9/11 than this: Crime and Punishment; Will the 9/11 Case Finally Go to Trial?

“…Owens was not impressed by what she found on Capitol Hill. Most of the senators and representatives she met didn’t seem to care who was behind 9/11. “They just didn’t want to be seen as voting against the 9/11 families. So they would vote yes for it, and then try to sabotage it behind the scenes. . . . Washington is an ugly place.”

For September 11th, I was a guest on RT UK’s show Going Underground. The host, Afshin Rattansi, is terrific. I’ve pasted below my appearance from the last time I was on his show, almost three years ago:

I’ve done a large number of tv and radio interviews the last few weeks about the American wars in the Middle East. I’ve been focusing a lot of my attention on the men who are behind these policies, Generals Mattis, Kelly and McMaster, as I believe understanding their world views, how they view themselves and their resulting intentions are crucial in understanding how American war policy evolved and, under Donald Trump, is different from the war policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Forgive the apparent vanity in sharing so many videos of myself right now, but I think I touch on a different aspect of the wars, and for that matter American society, in each of the following videos.

Comments on Syria, the world view of White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly, and the lineage of American wars and use of airstrikes. From the National Press Club, August 2017, aired via CSPAN:

The full news conference, that included Christie Edwards, John Kiriakou, David Swanson and Norman Solomon can be found here.

From Democracy Now, the morning after President Trump’s Afghanistan and Pakistan policy announcement, August 2017. I focus predominantly on the connection between our wars abroad and our wars at home, and the influence Generals Mattis, Kelly and McMaster have on President Trump. A transcript can be found here.

In this Real News interview, I discuss the influence of money on the wars, particularly the circular motion of Congress appropriating money for war, the money going to defense companies, defense companies funding think tanks and lobbyists, and those think tanks and lobbyists than justifying further defense spending, and the wars, to Congress. This was taped the day of President Trump’s Afghanistan and Pakistan speech in August 2017.

If you have any doubt how much money an extra 4,000 troops sent to Afghanistan generates in additional war spending, understand that we spend roughly $4 million dollars per soldier per year in Afghanistan. We have 11,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, soon to be 15,000, and we spend $44 billion dollars, in direct costs only, on the war. This spending, as well as the roughly $30 billion we are spending on the wars in Syria and Iraq is independent from the base defense budget, which the US Senate is currently considering. [This year’s budget is $700 billion, which is about $40 billion MORE than Donald Trump proposed with his $54 billion increase in the defense budget last spring, which it is important to remember is only 3% greater than what President Obama proposed to spend; President Obama having spent more money on the military than any other president since FDR and World War Two, in inflation adjusted dollars.]

The United States also utilizes 2.5 contractors for each soldier in Afghanistan. So the amount of money to be made on even a small troop increase is phenomenal, as the troop increase comes alongside increased air and artillery strikes in Afghanistan and the requirement for more bases and facilities to be built. (Disregard what people like Anthony Cordesman, who works for a think tank heavily funded by the defense industry, when they say things like new troops will utilize existing infrastructure in Afghanistan and not that much more extra money will be spent on the war with a troop increase. The generals always want more bases, because they always do; contractors always want to build more bases and sell more services; and there has not been an instance of per troop costs diminishing over the time of the conflict, only expanding – God forbid the journalists point these things out or ask the “experts” who are funded by the interests about which they are speaking to justify their assertions)

It is very simple: 4,000 more American soldiers to Afghanistan means more than $15 billion in spending for the Pentagon and defense industry.

A transcript of the following interview can be found here.

In this interview with RT America, from August 31, 2017, I speak about the totality of American war policy, and there really is no other policy than the war policy, in the Middle East and Afghanistan and how the policies in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Somalia are linked and united under a common strategy that seeks military control or subjugation of the local population through collaborating and subservient allies and proxies. The brutal use of military force, particularly that which we have witnessed in Iraq and Yemen by the Iraqi and Saudi militaries, supported directly by American air forces and commandos, is the strategy that will be put in place in Afghanistan and is what the United States is utilizing with its three air bases in Kurdish controlled Syria and the Kurdish army. We have also seen an increase in this use of strategy and operations in Somalia, I expect Libya will see the same.

This strategy differs from the Bush II and Obama strategies as there is no consideration for a political end state or political control of the population. No such thing as elections, negotiations, economic development, no attempts at winning hearts and mind, only subjugation and punishment. Yes, the Bush II and Obama wars were immoral, un-winnable and counter-productive, but there was an attempt or desire to have a political end state. Under this administration, with the policy controlled by the three generals, Mattis, Kelly and McMaster, the end state is military control of areas not sympathetic to the government through massive fire power and the use of highly trained commandos as the focus of effort against the enemy and the local population. So, in effect, the  Pashtun areas of southern, eastern and northern Afghanistan will become free fire zones with nightly kill/capture raids by commandos into villages and homes with subjugation, military control and punishment as the objectives of this violence and killing.

Finally, I did this interview with my friend Cat Watters. It’s been awhile since I’ve spoken with her. A very free ranging and relaxed interview which I really enjoyed doing, because Cat gets the emotions and humanity that underlay all of what I am talking about. Thanks Cat!

Wage Peace.

“US is arms factory for oppressive regimes, revolutionary movements”

MatthewHoh Interviews, War and Conflict , , , , , , , , , , ,

My comments on the President’s authorization for war in Iraq and Syria:

From RT.com

The US provides weapons to organizations bent on continuing wars thus it’s not surprising that this leads to escalation of conflicts instead of resolving them, Matthew Hoh, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, told RT.

RT: President Obama now wants ground troops to fight ISIS. Is this a tacit acceptance that airstrikes weren’t effective?

Matthew Hoh: Yes, it’s the acknowledgement that airstrikes were not successful. I think this is something that most of us who were skeptical of the American reentry into the Iraqi civil war and American entry into the Syrian civil war knew. It was just a matter of time before the president would buckle under and commit to putting American troops back into Iraq and into Syria.

READ MORE: Obama asks for ‘3yrs, no territorial limits’ formal war authority to target ISIS

RT: Obama says authorization for use of military force in the fight against Islamic State is not a request for another ground war. What do you make of that?

MH: I don’t believe that or understand why anyone would believe that. If you look at American policy over the last 15 years, particularly since 9/11 you see one mischaracterization, one blunder after another, all mischaracterized as an attempt to install democracy, to promote stability and peace. And what has occurred throughout the Middle East as a result of American intervention has been more chaos, more bloodshed and more instability. This notion that somehow there is not going to be a ground war is belied by this authorization itself. In that authorization it says there will be no enduring ground troops meaning that there will be no permanent ground troops. And the president can put as many troops into Iraq, into Syria and into any other places where he deems Islamic State is operating with the caveat that they are temporary and not permanent. So really it’s just semantics to hide the fact that the United States is going to find itself again in the Middle Eastern civil wars.

RT: The US President also said he wants to be able to use limited ground troops in certain situations and for a limited time. What does that actually mean?

MH: It means whatever he wants it to mean. Just six months ago he was saying there would be no ground troops and slowly as this war has accelerated and escalated, as airstrikes have not worked, as Islamic State has just gained in strength because of the Americans getting involved in the conflict in basically endorsing the Islamic State’s propaganda, its purpose in being. You’ve seen the administration have to commit now to putting in ground troops. Go back to when the president authorized bombing Syria just 4-5 months ago and he utilized Yemen as a model of success that we were going to base our operations in Iraq and Syria on the Yemeni model which was successful. Of course since then the Yemeni government has been overthrown, the United States has had to evacuate its embassy from Yemen and overall the entire country is in chaos. So you saw how quickly that model fell apart and it never had any semblance of reality toward success.

RT: Islamic State is not only limited to Iraq and Syria – it also has active members in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Can you imagine a situation where the US moves against them too?

MH: I don’t believe so. I don’t believe the US has the interest of putting ground troops, mass amounts of ground troops, certainly it will use drones and special operation forces in those countries. But I do think you’ll see the US limiting its ground troops, in the sense of conventional ground troops, battalions and brigades, soldiers, tanks, trucks, those kinds of things to Iraq and Syria.

RT: Well, talking about Yemen, the US has been sending arms to the country to fight terrorism. Now the reports say the equipment is in the hands of rebels. Is it surprising?

MH: It’s not surprising. The US is the largest arms merchant in the world. By some estimates it provides three quarters of the world’s arms. So we are a factory for other oppressive regimes or for these revolutionary movements. And of course when the regimes are overthrown or these movements fail or become scattered, or become more radical, a case in point is what happened in the 1990s in Afghanistan. You have the US providing munitions, weapons, arms to all sorts of organizations that are bent on continuing the wars. It’s not surprising that our weapons we provide to Yemen have ended up in the wrong hands or in hands that are choosing to escalate their conflict further.

RT: Can this policy help to bring peace eventually?

MH: No, it’s certainly not. This is adding kerosene to burning fires. This is a policy that is fraught with moral negligence as well as practical inconsideration. Where this policy has worked where the United States has sent mass amounts of weapons to an organization or to a government or to what we describe as rebel groups that the result has been peace and stability? Almost always it results in greater civil wars, longer escalations. And now we see the US is looking to send arms to Ukraine which will only serve to solidify the regime in Kiev but will do nothing to promote any type of peace or stability or long-term solutions in that conflict.

RT: Why do they keep on trying to resolve various crises around the world by sending arms to then?

MH: I think there are a number of reasons. One of course is the money. This provides billions of dollars every year to the American arms industry. That arms industry, which by some estimates is the second largest export the US has after agriculture, provides a lot of campaign donations for politicians. It provides a lot of support for academics, intellectuals, and people in think-tanks to come up with policies, to promote American intervention abroad which then requires more arms purchases for US military use or sold to other client states… If we are selling arms to one country that means that country is on our side. And for many in Washington DC who simply view the worldin an us-versus-them approach, it’s a way to keep the score of whether or not a certain country is on our side, is a client state, or is opposed to us. So there are a number of reasons for this, none of which serve to promote any form of stability or peace in the world.

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