When it comes to anything associated with war-making and foreign policy, the U.S. seems uniquely tolerant to consistently wasting such huge amounts with barely a bat of the eye in response from official Washington. The doomed Iraq fiasco was so riddled with corruption and incompetence that entire pallets of cash — literally, piles of billions of dollars — disappeared for months and years. As in Afghanistan, projects funded by aid dollars and meant to help the Iraqi people were consistently wasted and stolen, undermining U.S. efforts, threatening the lives of our men and women in uniform and sapping the reputation of American power in the process. The same, of course, has happened in every American war, but since the end of World War II, efforts to raise hell about it here at home have noticeably slackened. Harry Truman, for instance, came to national prominence while serving as a U.S. senator from Missouri by holding inquiries into war profiteering and waste even as that war was going on. Even earlier, both during and after World War I and the U.S. Civil War, war waste was eagerly hunted after by members of Congress seeking to embarrass the sitting president or to make a point about the evils of foreign entanglements. There was even, if you can imagine such a thing, genuine outrage over the financial scandals that inevitably came to light because of these investigations. Today, however, these stories are so commonplace that the only explanation is that we as a country have simply grown used to them. After all, if the trillion-dollar boondoggles that are the Air Force’s F-22 and F-35 fighters, the Navy’s littoral combat ship and the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle aren’t enough to create mobs of outraged citizens descending on the Pentagon and White House with torches and pitchforks, warzone corruption and waste certainly isn’t going to, either. So, what happened? Clearly, the emergence of a permanent war establishment — both in government and in the private sector — has had a prominent role to play in creating a general sense of apathy toward military and foreign-policy waste of this type. What were relatively tiny or non-existent industries before World War II, are today corporate monstrosities with huge public-relations departments that line the pockets of executives, shareholders, politicians and employees across the country. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex has clearly come to pass.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 01:26:33 +0000
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