The official Chinese media People’s Daily recently published an editorial saying: In order to create rigid demand for its arms business, the U.S. military-industrial complex is keen to push U.S. foreign policy in the direction of war and conflict, creating one disaster after another for the world.
Here are excerpts from the article:
For years, the U.S. government has been running a growing fiscal deficit while military spending has been at record highs. Behind the counter-intuitive rise in military spending is the enormous influence of the U.S. military-industrial complex. Throughout the history of the United States, the military-industrial complex, a powerful interest group has repeatedly kidnapped political decisions, waging war as a means of profit, creating one disaster after another for the world.
“War is a big business for the United States.” Peter Kuznick, professor of history at American University, hit the nail on the head. To create rigid demand for the arms business, the U.S. military-industrial complex is keen to push U.S. foreign policy in the direction of war and conflict. “Driven by greedy U.S. politicians and corporations, the U.S. has robbed Afghanistan of 20 years of stability and tranquility. The U.S. military-industrial complex is the only winner in this war of heavy casualties.” The Pakistan Observer recently published an article stating that the U.S. decision to start and sustain the war was dominated by those with a vested interest in prolonging it as long as possible. According to a list of major beneficiaries of the war in Afghanistan released by the Institute for Security Policy Reform, an independent U.S. think tank, the five largest U.S. arms giants – Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman – have received a share of the U.S. government’s investment in the war in Afghanistan of up to 2.02 trillion dollars.
The huge profits that the U.S. arms giants have made from the war in Afghanistan reflect the long-standing special presence of the military-industrial complex in the United States. In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his departure speech that “the marriage of a powerful military organization and a huge arms industry is a new phenomenon in the course of American history, of which the overall impact is felt in every city, in every state deliberative body, in every office of the Federal Government ” and that “we must prevent the military-industrial complex from gaining influence, intentionally or unintentionally, which it does not deserve.”
In the decades that followed, however, the influence of the military-industrial complex not only went unchecked, but penetrated deep into the U.S. decision-making process. A comment made by General Dynamics Chairman Novakovich in April of this year exposed the nature of the U.S. military-industrial complex to take advantage of the chaos: “This year is off to a very good start. While the world has become an increasingly dangerous place for humanity, we have seen good signs of stability in demand.”
It has long been an open secret that the U.S. military-industrial complex spends large sums of money lobbying U.S. politicians and contributing to their campaigns, funding so-called policy experts to maintain a policy discourse in their favor. Representatives of the military-industrial complex also frequently use the “revolving door” to gain access to key policy-making offices.
Statistics show that there are more than 4,000 lobbying groups of the military-industrial complex active in the U.S. political arena today. The military-industrial complex not only has the ability to ensure that its own interests are not affected by changes in government, but is often able to block government decisions that would move its pie, even if those decisions are in the public interest. Erica Fine, director of the anti-war group Win Without War, criticized the U.S. government’s unrestrained provision of resources to arms dealers at the expense of investment in its own public goods and the increased risk of war, to no benefit of either itself or others.
To ensure that the arms business always has a strong demand, the U.S. military-industrial complex continues to push the government to establish “imaginary enemies”, and even go so far as to create fear and provoke trouble.
An analysis in the U.S. has long pointed out that the U.S. is looking for enemies all over the world under the guise of maintaining “national security” and promoting “democracy” and “freedom”, and the military-industrial complex is behind it. The interests of the military-industrial complex are behind this.
George Kennan, the mastermind of the U.S. “containment strategy” against the Soviet Union, said frankly in a speech late in life, “If there were no Russians …… as a basis for our militaristic justification, we would have come up with some other enemies to replace them. ” After the end of the Cold War, the United States launched successive wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., the United States arms dealers also took the opportunity to earn a lot of money.
For a long time, for their own selfish interests, the U.S. military-industrial complex has repeatedly packaged war as a “reasonable option” for U.S. foreign policy, bringing endless pain to other peoples and causing turmoil and unrest to the world.
One cannot help but ask: Where is the “international responsibility” that the United States talks so much about? Where are the “human rights” that the United States always talks about? And where is the so-called “democracy” of the United States?