[PEN-L:8786] Progressive Response

[Interhemispheric Resource Center <ircalb@xxxxxxxx>]

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The Progressive Response   2 July 1999   Vol. 3, No. 23
Editor: Tom Barry
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The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in
Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and
the Institute for Policy Studies. We encourage responses to the opinions
expressed in PR.
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Table of Contents

I. Updates and out-Takes

*** MILITARY INDISTRIAL COMPLEX REVISITED ***
by William Hartung

II. Comments

*** U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS ***

*** WAS IT WORTH IT? ***
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I. Updates and out-Takes

*** MILITARY INDISTRIAL COMPLEX REVISITED ***
by William Hartung

(Editor's note. It's been 16 years since Ronald Reagan declared the Star
Wars missile defense system an essential component of U.S. military
spending. Since 1983, over $55 billion dollars has been spent in the name
of protecting the U.S. against missiles launched by the Soviet Union. The
end of the cold war and collapse of the Soviet Union should have made Star
Wars obsolete. Instead, the U.S. is continuing to fund Star Wars--now
retargeted to protect the U.S. from attacks by "rogue states" like Iraq and
North Korea. As William Hartung points out in the following excerpts from
his recently updated essay, Military-Industrial Complex Revisited: How
Weapons Makers are Shaping U.S. Foreign and Military Policies, the arms
industry has once again convinced Congress to continue throwing good money
after bad. For the full paper see:
http://is: http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/micr/).


Back to the Future?

"The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a huge arms
industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic,
political, and even spiritual--is felt in every city, every state house,
and every office of the federal government . . . In the councils of
government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Farewell Address to the Nation
January 17, 1961

Contrary to initial expectations, the military-industrial complex did not
fade away with the end of the cold war. It has simply reorganized itself.

As a result of a rash of military-industry mergers encouraged and
subsidized by the Clinton administration, the "Big Three" weapons
makers--Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon--now receive among themselves
over $30 billion per year in Pentagon contracts. This represents more than
one out of every four dollars that the Defense Department doles out for
everything from rifles to rockets.

On issue after issue--from expanding NATO, to deploying the Star Wars
missile defense system, to rolling back restrictions on arms sales to
repressive regimes--the arms industry has launched a concerted lobbying
campaign aimed at increasing military spending and arms exports. These
initiatives are driven by profit and pork barrel politics, not by an
objective assessment of how best to defend the United States in the
post-cold war period.

President Eisenhower's warning about the "acquisition of unwarranted
influence" by the military-industrial complex is as relevant today as it
was in 1961. Despite the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the breakup of
the Soviet Union, the U.S. military budget is higher today than it was when
Eisenhower gave his military-industrial complex speech in 1961. At more
than $276 billion per year, the U.S. military budget (in constant dollars)
remains near the peacetime cold war average that prevailed during the prime
period of U.S.-Soviet rivalry, from roughly 1950 to 1989. This is
astonishing considering that Russia has slashed its weapons procurement
budget by 77% since 1991, and that Russian forces could barely prevail over
a rebel army in Chechnya (inside its own borders), much less project force
against neighboring countries.


Shaping Policy, or How to Write Your Own Ticket

Beyond joining with key legislators to insert specific items into the
Pentagon budget--such as in the last-minute maneuvering between the White
House and Capitol Hill on the FY 1999 federal budget, the congressional
leadership added an astounding $9 billion to the Pentagon's funding,
including an extra $1 billion for Star Wars research--companies like
Lockheed Martin are also actively engaged in the business of shaping U.S.
foreign and military policies to meet their needs. This more sinister form
of lobbying can involve changing the terms under which major contractors
are reimbursed, such as the "payoffs for layoffs" subsidies for defense
industry mergers that Norman Augustine engineered prior to the
Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger; or eliminating royalty fees that foreign
arms customers had been paying to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for the cost
of weapons systems that were developed at taxpayer expense (a move that is
costing the Treasury roughly $500 million per year); or creating billions
of dollars of new grants and government-guaranteed loans to support the
export of U.S. weaponry; or lifting longstanding arms control curbs like
the ban on the sale of advanced combat aircraft to Latin America. In other
instances, contractors have weighed in heavily in favor of controversial
programs or policies that stand to benefit them. The most immediate
examples of this kind of lobbying are the Star Wars missile defense
program, which has received on average an extra $1 billion per year as a
result of lobbying by Pentagon contractors and conservative research and
advocacy groups


Pushing Weapons at Home: The Star Wars Lobby

One of the most amazing lobbying stories of recent times involves the work
done by the Pentagon, contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and
right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Center for
Security Policy (founded by former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney)
to keep Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program alive--despite radical changes in
the world security environment, which have rendered its original mission
obsolete, and a string of uninterrupted technical failures. Fifteen years
and $55 billion have gone down the drain since Ronald Reagan first gave his
Star Wars speech in March 1983, and the Soviet Union, whose nuclear
missiles were supposed to be the main target of Reagan's cherished missile
defense system, no longer exists.

Undaunted, the Star Warriors have devised a new mission for missile
defenses: to protect us against attacks by "rogue states" like Iraq and
North Korea, which don't even have missiles that can reach American
territory. And every time a major component of Star Wars fails--such as
Lockheed Martin's troubled Theater High Altitude Area Defense system
(THAAD), which is zero for five in tests conducted during this decade--the
Star Wars lobby in Congress shouts for more money.

The nerve center of the Star Wars lobby is Frank Gaffney's Center for
Security Policy (CSP), a think tank and advocacy organization that puts out
roughly 200 press releases per year (under the more authoritative name of
"national security decision briefs") touting missile defenses, increases in
the military budget, and other stock right-wing themes. Since its inception
in 1988, Gaffney's group has received over $2 million in corporate
donations, mostly from companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which are
major Star Wars contractors. Gaffney's CSP also has no fewer than five
Lockheed Martin executives on its board, not to mention vintage Star
Warriors such as weapons physicist Edward Teller and his protégé, George
Keyworth, who served as Ronald Reagan's science advisor when the Star Wars
scheme was first being hatched. The Center for Security Policy also has
close links to other conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation
and Empower America, both of which have representatives on the CSP board.

During the fall of 1998, the Star Wars lobby made a concerted effort to win
over one more senator to Sen. Thad Cochran's Defend America Act, which
would require deployment of a National Missile Defense system. Toward that
end, Empower America ran misleading radio ads in the state of Nevada in an
effort to convince residents that the reluctance of their two Democratic
senators, Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, to vote for a largely useless and
massively expensive missile defense system meant that they were against
"defending our families" from nuclear attack. In the short term, these
prodigious efforts on the part of the Star Wars lobby were in vain. Due in
part to a public backlash against the tactics used by special prosecutor
Kenneth Starr and the Republican congressional leadership in the Lewinsky
scandal, the Republicans failed to pick up a seat in the Senate in the 1998
elections, and Democratic incumbents like Harry Reid of Nevada and Barbara
Boxer of California, who had been specifically criticized for opposing Star
Wars, were reelected.

Despite these apparent setbacks in the 1998 elections, the Star Wars lobby
didn't give up; by the spring of 1999, both the Senate and the House had
been persuaded to pass legislation modeled on the Cochran bill which stated
that it is the policy of the United States government to deploy a National
Missile Defense as soon as it is "technologically feasible." While arms
control advocates like Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) tried to soften the blow by
sponsoring amendments calling for the United States to continue to pursue
nuclear weapons reductions with Russia, the passage of the two Star Wars
resolutions were clearly a major propaganda victory for conservative
missile defense boosters and their corporate sponsors.

William Hartung is a Senior Research Fellow at the World Policy Institute.
His
publications include Welfare for Weapons Dealers and Peddling Arms, Peddling
Influence.
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II. Comments

*** U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS ***

Dear Dr. Gershman:

In reading your recent article in The Progressive Response entitled
"Dynamics of US-China Relations," (June 10, 1999, v.3 n.21) I noticed
specifically your concluding statement which noted:

"A better strategy would recognize the longer-term strategic benefits of
enmeshing the U.S., China, and Japan within multilateral security
frameworks that provide the opportunity for confidence-building measures,
mutually verifiable force reduction, and disarmament commitments...."

We at the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy at
Georgia Tech couldn't agree more. The Center was designated as the Interim
Secretariat of the Limited Nuclear Weapons Free Zone for Northeast Asia
(LNWFZ-NEA) in 1996. The purpose of the project is to provide a vehicle for
the establishment of the first cooperative regional security institution in
Northeast Asia. The vehicle would be the establishment of a LNWFZ-NEA and
the institutional framework (including verification regimes) for such a
zone. This institution would then become a means through which the
day-to-day contact among the representatives might bring about other
confidence and security-building measures.

Your comments are greatly appreciated.

Alan Gorowitz
Program Coordinator
Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy
Georgia Institute of Technology
781 Marietta Street
Atlanta, GA 30318
Email: alan.gorowitz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.inta.gatech.edu/cistp.html
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*** WAS IT WORTH IT? ***

Dear Progressive Response:

Your reports have been very helpful. Now that the dust has settled, I offer
the following summary analysis:

*  Prior to the attack, U.S./NATO failed to adequately pursue nonviolent
alternatives;

*  Prior to the attack, U.S./NATO intentionally "set the bar too high" so
that Yugoslavia was unable to accept their nonnegotiable demands;

*  Genuine negotiations prior to the attack might very well have achieved
as much for the Kosovo Albanian people as did negotiations during the attack;

*  The U.S./NATO attack on Yugoslavia not only failed to achieve
multi-ethnic peace in Kosovo, it seriously damaged any hope for that key goal;

*  The U.S./NATO attack on Yugoslavia escalated the situation and magnified
the harm inflicted on the Kosovo Albanian people in the short term;

*  How much good for the Kosovo Albanian people can be salvaged from the
disaster will not be known for years;

*  In violation of international law, the U.S./NATO attack inflicted
economic ruin on the entire Yugoslav population, including babies,
children, and opponents of Milosevic;

*  If U.S./NATO had not formed an alliance with the crime-ridden and
unpredictable Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the bombing might still continue;

*  Grooming and establishing the KLA as the dominant military force in
Kosovo could foster ominous results similar to past alliances with Saddam
Hussein, General Noriega, and the Afghan guerrillas;

*  The U.S./NATO attack on Yugoslavia circumvented and purposefully
weakened the United Nations;

*  The Clinton-Gore Administration has taken the nation down a dangerous,
unknown path and has reversed the Democratic Party's post-Vietnam
resistance to reckless military adventures;

*  The United States should decide that it will not try to dominate the
world, but rather develop cooperative, democratic relations based on the
premise that all nations can and should exercise leadership.

Wade Hudson, Coordinator
San Francisco Progressive Challenge
http://www.igc.org/esp
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Tom Barry
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