Below, Seumas Milne well summarizes the calamitous results of our misbegotten GWOT* crusades in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The result is not pretty, but that is hardly surprising.
While Milne's call for accountability applies to the British contribution to the GWOT, it bespeaks volumes for the United States — a country that prides itself on its Constitutional system of Checks and Balances. Our self-referencing image begs the question: Given our sorry performance in the GWOT, what kind of checks in balances have been put into play on Capital Hill? Who in America is being held accountable for this debacle?
Certainly not the Pentagon or the Military-Industrial-
That is because the GWOT disaster has a golden lining — at least for some — it ratcheted up the cash flowing into the MICC to record levels, and more importantly, the long duration of GWOT provided time need by the MICC to weave its social safety net more deeply into our political economy via the time honored expedient of politically engineering the flow of dollars, jobs, and profits to virtually every congressional district in the United States and, let us not forget, Puerto Rico. Traditionally, political engineering has been the province of major weapons procurement, like the F-35; but the massive shift to privatization in the Pentagon's the Operations and Maintenance budget quietly opened a cornucopia of new political engineering opportunities for insinuation into heretofore unexploited fiscal regions, making the GWOT the gift that will keep on giving — at least until Obama's pivot to Asia solidifies a sufficiently solid budgetary foundation for a new Cold War.
