掮客，旋转门，永久战争，军工复合体

This was a war to end all wars. This was the war to make the world safe for democracy. At least 21,000 new millionaires were made in the U.S. Munition makers, ship builders, meat packers. And let us not forget the bankers, who financed the Great War, who turned blood into gold. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. All of them are looking ahead to war. The thing about politicians is that they're very much like prostitutes, but only more expensive. The politics is dictated by the whims of the arms industry. Welcome to Beirut, they are saying hello to you. There's a combination AK47 Kalashnikov. A society that decides that the bulk of it's budget is going to go to arms manufacturing, building up a military, et cetera, they have made a moral decision that militarism is more important than the creation of well-being for the population. I want you to name me any society in which you've had any large measure of that freedom where capitalism and free enterprise has not been the predominate mechanism. The free enterprise system has spread through the force of arms, and those arms were wielded by governments. That was government intervention, under the name of the free enterprise system, but a government intervention which destroyed the freedoms of many people. We have been supplying lethal weapons to terrorist nations, involving the U.S. government in military activities in direct contravention of the law, and lying to the Congress. Now I believe that democracy cannot survive that kind of abuse. People like Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, who were relatively new to government at the time, did not like when Congress said we need to step in and confront the national security state. And what's become a very out of control kill program. I think that there was a substantial shadow government, trying to run foreign affairs for the United States. These events have been characterized by some pretty strong statements. Not only does Cheney defend Iran-Contra, but he argues that Iran-Contra is actually a model for how the U.S. should be conducting it's national security policy. Effectively what you're doing is saying on certain parts of American policy, we don't have a democracy, we have a dictatorship. These guys had a very long term plan for how they were going to increase the powerful infrastructure of private companies. What we've essentially done is to create a network of corporations that have the fire power of small nation-states. That could, you know, overthrow some small governments around the world. In essence, we in the United States have privatized the ultimate public function: war. Bombs have got a time limit, they're like food. Munitions has got sell-by dates. You gotta get rid of it. In Iraq, the F-16s and F-18s were firing six million dollars within seconds, coming back, re-arming and going up again. There's no hope of ending war, because there's always a small cobble of people for whom war is really, really good business. It doesn't matter that we're losing the war in Afghanistan. It's good for them, good for profit. 35,000 lobbyists in Washington, they write the legislation, they write the bills. It's called political engineering. And unlike political science, political engineering is real. The way we do it is by downplaying the future consequences to start a new weapon. We over promise it's performance, under promise it's cost. We then, systematically spread dollars, jobs and profits to as many congressional districts as quickly as possible, so that everybody has skin in the game. Individuals operating in the shadows, and never having their names called, are able to leverage the power of the military and the foreign policy apparatus for their own personal pecuniary ends. How do we justify all this tanks, all this planes, all this bullshit? What better new enemy than an hypothetical invisible enemy called the War on Terror? When we realize how we've entered into a permanent state of war, like what often proponents of counter-terrorism on a global scale, think of as a long war, but a war without end. What we've accepted is a political regime that is sustained by fear. I don't think one has to justify the cost and nature of the national security state, one just has to keep the people fearful enough to support it. Gradually the corridors became permeated with a sort of very sick smell. And I realized it was the smell of the gas that they were coughing up from their lungs, and I was going along the corridors, opening all the windows in the night air, trying to clean the train out of this smell of, obviously, chemical warfare. The heads of government are the sales people in chief of their country's large arms contractors. And this is the template used by large defense contractors around the world. Corruption is not merely a dirty little detail on top of the arms trade, it's actually, in a lot of cases, what drives the international arms trade. Many of these deals would not happen if they did not provide opportunities for personal enrichment. You conserve two sets of principles, privilege and power, or justice and truth. The more you make compromises with those who serve privilege and power, the more you diminish the capacity for justice and truth. That is the journalism you're getting fed. And I sometimes think the LA Times and the New York Times, should be called American Officials Say. I denounced the call to invade Iraq publicly. The New York Times issued me a formal written reprimand, which is what you get before you're fired, under Union rules, to stop speaking out against the war. How can you come out of Gaza and not be angry? How can you come out of the Sudan, El Salvador, dozens of other places I've been, and not be angry? Dostoevsky said, "Hell is the inability to love, and that's what kills people." I fully get why people blow their brains out. It's really hell. The only way you're healed from those experiences is by re-establishing a connection with that kind of power with another human being. And if you can't do that, you don't survive. I have friends who couldn't do it, and they're not here anymore. One of the manifestations of the national security state, especially in the apogee it's arrived at today, is that it destroys diplomacy. It destroys the will to diplomacy, and it destroys the skill for diplomacy. If you're a small state, you've got to be exquisitely good at diplomacy. You've got to be able to talk yourself out of lots of things, and make deals and compromises and so forth. But if you're the world's hedge men you don't deal with anybody, you smack 'em. The doctrine that has endured from Bush to Obama is that the world is a battlefield, and that the United States has the right to go into any country around the world to conduct, what they call, kinetic operations, lethal operations, regardless of what international law says. He embraced the very covert shadow forces that a decade earlier had only been talked about in hushed tones in the Pentagon. Not just as the implementors of a policy that said we should decapitate terror networks, and engage in preemptive strikes, but they became the policy itself. President Obama's administration have built up something called the Disposition Matrix. It's like an algorithm for determining who should be killed, or who should we seek to capture. And one of the more grotesque aspects of this, is that there were actually meetings on Tuesdays, in the White House, that have been nicknamed Terror Tuesday Meetings. Where they're going through rosters of names to put on, or take off the list. It's the disease of permanent war that destroyed the Middle East. It empower all of those who profit from permanent war. Politically, economically and militarily. What was interesting was that many Israelis, including people from the military said, as long as there is an existential threat, somewhere, somehow, that it is certainly helping us expand our budgets, in ways that is not possible to do in the absence on anything that can be defined as such a threat. War has become a commodity for several reasons. One is because you need somebody to buy the stuff you produce. The ultimate manifestation of the national security state is that it, not only seeks a perpetual state of war, it will even go to all ends to create that perpetual state of war. "I am an invisible man. Not because I don't exist, but because you choose not to see me." In public they say, we have to end terrorism. Meanwhile, this private work of getting involved in conflicts stirs the pot, which produces characters that appear to become terrorists, which reinforces the public narrative, and then makes things like intervention okay. The first thing that they say when they try to market, "We've already used that on actual human beings." Once you start a war, you open a kind of Pandora's box. You don't control it, it controls you. The images of war are very carefully controlled and countered by the lives that have been disseminated through every institution in society, schools, government, entertainment, the press. When you shatter the myth, and when you understand, especially what techno-war, industrial war is about, which is really about murder, about slaughter, people would be so repulsed. It would be very hard to wage war.