Corporate War At Home and Abroad

If a simple explanation suffices, perhaps one need not look any further, and the simplest explanation for the rush to attack Iran is greed.

Meir Dagan, recently retired head of Mossad, is on a campaign to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran. And now, the New York Times reports:

American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Mossad says no; U.S. intel analysts say no. So, why are so many politicians trying to start a war?

Follow the money. The U.S. political system is increasingly under the control of major corporations. Corporations exist to make money; they do not possess “patriotism” or, indeed, any other “feelings.” Why would they? You did not think they were people, did you?

Now consider how Iran looks to a major U.S. corporation…say, a corporation that makes its money rebuilding infrastructure destroyed in a war, a corporation that buys drinking water systems or telecommunications systems or petroleum production facilities or…oil. Considering the profits such companies made from the attack on Iraq (also see here), imagine the profits they would make from rebuilding a destroyed Iran, a country three times as large.

The links between corporate war profiteering when the U.S. attacks another country and the behavior of such companies toward the American public are worth careful contemplation. Cheney’s company Halliburton went on from enormous Iran war profiteering (and was accused by the Pentagon’s top auditor of widespread fraud) to contributing to the poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico, according to the presidential oil spill commission. More recently, Halliburton has been thumbing its nose at rising American popular and government concerns about natural gas fracking to the point of being the only company contacted by the EPA for information that refused to cooperate until served with a subpoena. When corporations are given blank checks for abusive behavior overseas, they naturally assume they can behave the same inside the U.S.

And as for the Israeli connection, the Israeli economy has been completely transformed since the good old kibbutz days into a super-high-tech economy targeted at such applications as security and outright arms exports. Israeli security exports have risen from $2 to $7 billion since 9/11, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry, which cited the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as sources of its profit. Despite an over-reliance on high-paid contractors so costly that even General McCrystal criticized it, the army of U.S. mercenaries remains on station in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and not only Israeli companies but Israeli companies with close ties to Israeli military/intelligence circles, are attempting to participate. European countries, including Germany, are also using Israeli military equipment in Afghanistan. U.S. wars in the Muslim world have become a crucial economic pillar of the Israeli state.

The rising number of current and recently retired U.S. Israeli military/intelligence officials who have found the courage to speak out publicly against an unprovoked attack on Iran as a danger to the two countries’ national security are fighting against a tsunami of economic self-interest in war profiteering.