Rebuilding Iraq: an historical precedent in post WW2 Germany.

I'm not a fan of the long post, but here goes:

I'm reading Richard Parker's biography of JK Galbraith. In it Parker describes the political machinations at the end of WW2 that occurred as American corporations started angling for a post war economy that would make them rich. Parker describes an America transitioning from the deeply-progressive FDR government to a Truman government that started to come under the sway of anti-communists and Wall St.

Parker argues that FDR's vision for a post-war world pictured a peaceful economic competition with the soviet union. FDR was able, through his brilliant negotiating abilities and by having his finger on the pulse of Stalin and Churchill, to balance interests which allowed the three nations to work together during the war, and he was confident that he could do the same after the war.

Truman, however, didn't have those skills. His first meeting with the Russian minister Molotov was a disaster, and things quickly went downhill. And, even worse, Truman shifted allegiance from progressive goals, to satisfying Wall St. (To the dismay of New Dealers, out of 125 of Truman's early appointments, 97 of them went to financiers, CEOs,corporate lawyers, and generals, causing some to note that Truman was shifting power from the people to a "Wall St-West Point axis.")

Parker illuminates this transition with a story about Galbraith's return to government service after working for Fortune during the war years. At the end of the war, after the German surrender and before V-J day, the US government sent Galbraith to Germany to study the effectiveness of air bombing of Europe. He was to produce a report to a commission headed by corporate lawyers (who represented financiers, like JP Morgan, who made a great deal of money off of WW1 and stood to make a great deal of money depending on the direction the US military took after WW2).

At the time, these financiers and corporate interests wanted the government to conclude that aerial bombing was very successful. Building an air force from almost 0 and growing it to 110% was going to cause a lot of money to change hands. Furthermore, an air force is expensive to maintain. Bombs are expensive and have to be replaced, and every pilot has to be wrapped in a very expensive machine. So, yes, corporations wanted the aerial raids to be deemed successful.

Galbraith found, however, that the air raids were not effective. Less than 5% of the damage during WW2 was caused by air attacks. Furthermore, they were extremely inefficient at hitting targets and caused terrible civilian deaths. (The book has more detail on the failures of the bombing, noting that German industrial production actually increased as the bombing became more intense).

The lawyers on the commission did everything they could to cover this up. Unfortunately the message didn't influence the strategy in Japan. Japan, at the time, acquired most of its resources from the countries it invaded, so dropping bombs on Japan didn't effect its ability to continue with the war. Instead, Japan's war effort was really hurt by the US Navy intercepting their trade routes and landing on beaches in the Pacific. Regardless, we carpet bombed Japan with incendiary devices designed and tested on model Japanese cities built on FL base to burn at precisely the rate that made it impossible for firefighters to put out the fires, and then we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. It was an expensive waste of time and lives considering the US Navy was strangling the Japanese war machine by cutting off their access to rubber, oil and everything else they needed to continue fighting. But, hey, whatever, The false perception that planes and bombs would win wars was going to make Wall St rich.

So, now on to the post-war reconstruction of Germany. What to do in Germany? New Dealers wanted to keep FDR's dream alive. They believed friendly economic competition with the Soviets would be enough. Galbraith, himself, argued that there was nothing to fear in social democracy. He said that once capitalist nations take necessary steps to ensure a good level of employment, social security and health care, and once socialist countries make the obvious concessions to market realities, there isn't much difference between the capitalism and social democracies.

People like Galbraith believed that the best thing that could be done with germany was to put money into it, let the workers have jobs, etc., and not to use it as an ideological battleground.

However, the same corporate interests wanting a big air force wanted Germany to be seen as a battle ground of ideologies. People within the Truman government more interested in helping along the military budget to escalate (to the benefit of Wall St) convinced Truman that the Soviets were a military threat. Those ideas led to the division of Germany, and to the CIA financing right wing governments in Europe so to undermine the social democrats, and the beginning of the cold war.

Instead of encouraging nations to work together to ensure economic security for the people of the world, conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican Party triumphed over the New Dealers and turned the world into a battlefield polarized by ideologies, and on that battlefield, left behind were the concerns and well-being of the "common man" (borrowing from Henry Wallace's statement that the post war world "can and must be seen as the age of the common man" rather than one of the imperialist American Century).

So doesn't some of this sound familiar?

Today, we've seen the triumph of the military industrial complex. In 1998 there was a study that concluded that the US had spent 18 trillion dollars on defense spending (a third of that on nuclear weapons) and the next highest expenditure was $8 trillion on social security, and $4.7 trillion on financing the debt. A very large percentage of that has gone to making corporations rich. But what would happen to those fat profits if the world weren't seen as a dangerous place?

Today, we have the same voices claiming that air superiority is the route to military success (even though its probably the case that today just as in WW2, it's the most expensive and destructive, least effective way to achieve (legitimate) strategic goals).

We have the same voices saying that American values need to be exported to the world because America is ina unique, powerful position, and because we're right.

But, in a world without a soviet threat, the world needs some new polarizing influence to justify continued spending on the corporations that gained so much power over the last half century (the Wall St-West Point axis). So we've found our new polarity -- terrorism. And just as post-war reconstruction of Germany was the battlefield between New Dealers and Cold Warriors, I think Iraq reconstruction is a similar battlefield (although there's no "New Deal" equivalent arguing for the interests of the common man, since the left doesn't seem to understand this situation the way Roosevelt might have -- that it's really a battle over who is going to get rich, the people or corporations not interested in the lives of the common men and women and it's cloaked by a battle of ideologies and a fear that we could lose that battle).

Rather than Iraq becoming a place where every citizen gets a piece of the pie and, as a consequence, will be allowed to be masters of their own national destiny, Iraq is being built to be a bulwark in an ideological battle that's designed to promote more conflict so that huge military budgets can be justified.

This is fascinating.

I agree with much of your interpretations and conclusions, and I just saved this posting as a file for later rereading.

"Here's a phrase by Gailbraith that has stuck to my memory like glue:
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johnkennet107301.html

pnorman

Just as "fighting Communism" justified almost every conceivable ugliness from drug-smuggling to assasination to genocide, now we have a newly manufactured threat to keep the folks in line, ignorant to what's being done to them and in their name, and filling the vaults of plutocrats.

All one has to do to see where this all stems from is to "follow the money".

Bread and Circuses have been updated to Big Macs and ESPN.

and policy are so direct, it's hard to come to any conclusion other than profits for powerful conrporations motivate American foreign policy.

I haven't gotten to the Kennedy years yet, but as of 1950, I'm shocked that FDR's vision for the world (no threat of violence, peaceful economic competion, and government that worked for the common men and women, and not for the wealthiest) so quickly disappeared from the political landscape.