More on Military Corruption

"Corruption" occurs when government has the power to use force to extract money from the unwilling, and can use the money without accountability.

Corruption is accentuated when those paying the tribute believe they are more "patriotic" the more they pay. Corruption is rewarded when the quest for accountability is labeled "unpatriotic."

Warren Mass writes:

As Robert Welch warned long ago, the foreign policy elite shamelessly exploits our support for the military in order to insulate from criticism those policymakers whose actions precipitate such tragedies as 9-11. During the Vietnam War, for instance, relatively few Americans understood how U.S. aid and trade with Communist nations materially supported the Communist drive to conquer Vietnam.

That same aid resulted in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which prompted U.S. aid to Osama and his "freedom fighters."

Panic, as well as patriotism, is an excellent "revenue enhancement" device, as Will Grigg writes in "Panic Profiteering."

But as with all government programs, in order to get $1 in "aid" to the designated recipient (whether it be the Soviet Union or Osama bin Laden), $2-3 taxpayer dollars must be spent to "administer" the funds. This is where "corruption" is rife.

As if the recipient itself isn't evidence of corruption, as Warren Mass continues:

In similar fashion, relatively few Americans are aware that the same CFR brain trust presiding over the Iraq War helped bring Saddam to power and created his war machine. Even fewer are aware of the material support given to international terrorism by the “former” Communists in power in Russia, including particularly President Vladimir Putin, a veteran of the KGB (and whom President Bush regards as a soul mate). Russia and Communist China are treated as strategic allies in the “war on terrorism,” despite their abundant — and continuing — support for international terrorism, particularly in the Middle East.

The Federal Government has long supported terrorist regimes. Mass continues:

In his 1967 essay about Vietnam, Mr. Welch asked rhetorically if it were possible “that any war carried on against the Communists by [Secretary of Defense] Robert Strange McNamara or [Secretary of State] Dean Rusk is going to be any different from the one they sponsored in the Congo — or more recently in the Dominican Republic — where the net result was the destruction or demoralization of as much as possible of the native anti-Communist strength?”

We could as easily ask the same about the current crop of CFR elitists presiding over the “war on terrorism.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad as a presidential emissary in 1983 and 1984, offering to provide Saddam with valuable military and economic aid. During the late 1990s, future Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, a taxpayer-subsidized conglomerate that made huge sums doing business with Iraq and Libya. L. Paul Bremer, the Bush administration’s colonial viceroy in Baghdad, was a prominent player at Kissinger Associates, the international consulting firm that arranged many of the deals that built Saddam’s arsenal in the 1980s.

Added to this direct aid to America's enemies is the cost of administrative fees charged by the federal bureaucracies.

More on the absence of accountability in the federal government's military:

Iraq War: The Biggest Boondoggle Ever

Controversy in the Military -- Will Anything Change?

The Walls of Jericho

The total amount of money transferred from Americans to Cheney-Kissinger-Bush-BinLaden family interests is staggering.

The Boston Globe reports that The Congressional Budget Office estimates that as of June, up to $500 billion has been spent on combat operations in Iraq. But the Christian Science Monitor reports that researchers led by a Nobel Prize-winning economist has concluded that indirect costs may bring the figure above $2 Trillion.

Too many libertarians are willing to privatize the Post Office, but not the military. The argument for military "inefficiency" and corruption are great arguments for privatizing defense, to say nothing about the military's role in giving aid to communism and terrorism. The complete privatization of the U.S. federal military would have saved hundreds of millions of lives and trillions of dollars in private wealth over the last century.