Remember the “Peace Dividend”?

Hahahaha, yes, I know, I’m laughing too. What in the world were we thinking, anyway? For those of you who forgot; back in 1990, when the fall of the Soviet Union ushered in the end of the Cold War, it was believed that the vast military expenditures of that era would be diminished to such a degree that billions of dollars would instead be invested in things like schools, cities, roads, health care, or just a nice fat tax refund to every American family.

Silly us. We forgot the warnings of both Dwight Eisenhower and George Orwell that a military economy was self-perpetuating and would always find new excuses to justify its existence. Still, in 1990, I’m sure the CEO’s at the chief defense industries and the generals in the Pentagon were terrified that they might soon become obsolete. Luckily for them, this tin-horn dictator that nearly all Americans had never heard of came along to save the day. In August of that year, before the dust of the demolished Berlin Wall could settle, Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait. This in itself could have been tolerated, but when he moved his troops to the border of Saudi Arabia, thus threatening our oil and the Bush family’s good buddies, the Saudi royals; it was time for massive military action. 500,000 American troops rushed to the area before the Iraqi Republican Guards had time to unpack their torture equipment.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the military establishment in this country secretly sent Saddam a fruit basket in gratitude, him being the most convenient enemy in American history. And our former good buddy as well. We backed him in his disastrous war with Iran and when he gassed the Kurds in 1981 (the crime he’s most condemned for), both then-president Ronald Reagan and Donald Rumsfeld signaled that they really could have cared less. An internal matter; none of our business. In fact, some Western corporations supplied components for the attack. But threatening our oil supply transformed him from “Our Good Buddy” to “That Evil Monster” and so his fate was sealed. And in doing so, the American military-industrial cabal got itself a new lease on life. Motivated by patriotism and our love of freedom, you might think? Sorry, guess again, it’s all about the money.

For, according to a recent article in MSN Money by Michael Brush, thanks to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq, the CEO’s of the major American defense industries have reaped annual pay gains from 200% to nearly 700% in the years since 2001. In the top seven alone, which includes such companies as General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin, Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s old firm) and Boeing, the head honchos have earned nearly a half-billion dollars in profit during this period. To give one example of this windfall, Robert Bohn who heads Oshkosh Truck, a main military vehicle supplier for the Iraq war, saw his annual pay of $1.1 million in 2001 soar to $8.7 million in 2006. General Dynamic’s CEO, Nicholas Chabraja annual pay leapt from $8 to $19.5 million during the same period. Investors in war stocks are happy too. Shares in Halliburton increased from $5 a share in 2002 to $40 a share last year. And the hired killers of firms like Blackwater earn a sum astronomically higher than the average grunt.

So much for war being hell.

Brush ends his article with the following observations. “Extravagant executive pay isn’t in keeping with the spirit of shared sacrifice that our country has always called for in time of war,” he writes, “and high profits create the risk – or at least the appearance - that a war might be prolonged for profit motives.” Which is exactly what seems to be happening.

That the defense industry has become an economic behemoth with undue influence on our nation’s politics is a fairly new phenomenon, Howard Zinn to the contrary. We entered World War I with an air force about equal to Bolivia, so backwards that our pilots flew French planes for the duration. The advent of World War II saw our military equally understaffed and under-funded, and when the war ended, the de-mobilization of both the armed forces and the war industries was staggering (and supported by both Democrats and Republicans). By the late 1940’s the annual American defense budget was only $10 billion, which even adjusted for inflation, is a paltry amount for a newly-anointed superpower. But this was about to change. Faced with both the growing threat of the Soviet Union (run by the increasingly paranoid Joseph Stalin) and the takeover of China in 1949 by the Communists under Mao, the State Department crafted a policy statement entitled NSC 68. This unknown, but vital document called for the transformation of the United States into a “national security state” that would greatly expand the military and the role of the defense industries. President Truman passed this measure over the objections of the Secretary of Defense who was deliberately left out of the decision process. In 1950, the defense budget was quadrupled from $13 billion to $55 billion (the facts in this paragraph are documented in David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter”). The start of the Korean War and the continuation of the Cold War sealed this posture which we are still trapped in.

As a whole, the nations of the world spend about a trillion dollars a year on war (that’s $1,000,000,000,000 every twelve months). One could only imagine what that money could do to end worldwide hunger, poverty, and disease. Three quarters of that sum is spent by the United States. As we lurch towards an uncertain and somewhat dismal Christmas season, we might further wonder what the Prince of Peace would think of a country like ours that spends such a monstrous sum on war and weapons while cutting health care, food and fuel aid to millions of its most vulnerable citizens. And would God go out of its way to bless a nation with such unjust priorities?

Don’t bet on it.