"'Our chief competitor both in Europe and outside it will be unable to trade, and at the conclusion of the War the unmistakable antagonism which German aggression is everywhere arousing will help us to keep the trade and shipping we will win from her.'"
To Carl von Clausewitz, who died in 1831, war was "a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means." That sounds about right, as long as we understand that war makers often have a preference for the means of war even when other means might achieve the same results. In an August 31st, 2010, Oval Office speech praising the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama exclaimed: "New markets for our goods stretch from Asia to the Americas!" In 1963, John Quigley, not yet an analyst of war lies, was a Marine assigned to lecture his unit on world affairs. When one of his students objected to the idea of fighting in Vietnam, Quigley "explained patiently that there was oil underneath Vietnam's continental shelf, that Vietnam's large population was an important market for our products, and that Vietnam commanded the sea route from the Middle East to the Far East."
But let's start at the beginning. Before he became president, William McKinley said "We want a foreign market for our surplus products." As president, he told Governor Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin he wanted "to attain U.S. supremacy in world markets." When Cuba was in danger of achieving its independence from Spain without assistance, McKinley persuaded Congress not to recognize the revolutionary government. After all, his goal was not Cuban independence, or Puerto Rican or Filipino independence. When he took over the Philippines, McKinley thought he was advancing the goal of "supremacy in world markets." When the people of the Philippines fought back, he called it an "insurrection." He described the war as a humanitarian mission for the Filipinos' own good. McKinley pioneered by saying first what later presidents would say as a matter of routine when engaged in wars for resources or markets.
"The pressure of this approaching crisis, I am certain, has gone beyond the ability of the Morgan financial agency for the British and French governments. The financial necessities of the Allies are too great and urgent for any private agency to handle, for every such agency has to encounter business rivalries and sectional antagonism. It is not improbable that the only way of maintaining our present preeminent trade position and averting a panic is by declaring war on Germany."
When peace had been made with Germany ending World War I, President Wilson kept U.S. troops in Russia to fight the Soviets, despite earlier claims that our troops were in Russia in order to defeat Germany and intercept supplies bound for Germany. Senator Hiram Johnson (P., Calif.) had famously said of the launching of the war: "The first casualty when war comes, is truth." He now had something to say about the failure to end the war when the peace treaty had been signed. Johnson denounced the ongoing fighting in Russia and quoted from the Chicago Tribune when it claimed that the goal was to help Europe collect Russia's debt.
In 1935, considering the brewing financial interest in war with Japan, Norman Thomas pointed out that, at least from a national perspective, if not from the perspective of particular profiteers, it made no sense: "Our whole trade with Japan, China, and the Philippines in 1933 amounted to 525 million dollars or enough to have carried on the First World War for less than two and one-half days!"
Yes, he called it the "first" world war, because he saw what was coming. One year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a State Department memo on Japanese expansionism said not a word about independence for China. But it did say:
". . . our general diplomatic and strategic position would be considerably weakened -- by our loss of Chinese, Indian, and South Seas markets (and by our loss of much of the Japanese market for our goods, as Japan would become more and more self-sufficient) as well as by insurmountable restrictions upon our access to rubber, tin, jute, and other vital materials of the Asian and Oceanic regions."
During World War II, Secretary of State Cordell Hull chaired a "committee on political problems" which decided to handle perceived public fears that the United States would try to "feed, clothe, reconstruct, and police the world." The fears would be calmed by convincing the public that U.S. goals were to prevent another war and to provide "free access to raw materials and [foster] international commerce." The words of the Atlantic Charter ("equal access") became "free access," meaning access for the United States, but not necessarily for anybody else.
During the Cold War, the stated reasons for wars changed more than the real ones, as fighting communism gave cover for killing people to win markets, foreign labor, and resources. We said we were fighting for democracy, but we backed dictators like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The result was a bad name for the United States, and the empowering of leftist governments in reaction to our interference. Senator Frank Church (D., Idaho) concluded that we had "lost, or grievously impaired, the good name and reputation of the United States."
Even if war makers did not have economic motives, it would still be impossible for corporations not to see economic gains as fortuitous byproducts of wars. As George McGovern and William Polk noted in 2006: "In 2002, just before the American invasion [of Iraq], only one of the world's ten most profitable corporations was in the oil and gas field; in 2005 four of the ten were. They were Exxon-Mobil and Chevron Texaco (American) and Shell and BP (British). The Iraq war doubled the price of crude; it would go up another 50 percent during the first months of 2006."
FOR THE PROFITS
Profiting from the waging of war has been a common part of U.S. wars since at least the Civil War. During the 2003 War on Iraq Vice President Cheney directed massive no-bid contracts to a company, Halliburton, from which he was still receiving compensation, and profited from the same illegal war he defrauded the American public into launching. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was a little more circumspect in his war profiteering. The Stop the War Coalition kept up with him, however, writing in 2010:
"[Blair] earns -2 million a year for one day a month's work, from the US investment bank J P Morgan, who just happen to be making huge profits from financing 'reconstruction' projects in Iraq. There's no end of gratitude for Blair's services to the oil industry, the Iraq invasion so clearly being aimed at controlling the world's second largest oil reserves. The Kuwaiti Royal Family paid him around a million to produce a report on Kuwait's future, and business deals though a consultancy he has set up to advise other countries in the Middle East are projected to earn around -5 million a year. Just in case he runs short, he has signed up with the South Korean oil firm UI Energy Corporation, which has extensive interests in Iraq and which some estimates say will eventually net him -20 million."
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