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Global ‘culture of war’ mean profits for the arms industry [1]
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Date: 2023-06
While most would agree there is no such thing as a ‘good war’, those taking a calculated view might argue that such a thing would mean a quick victory with minimal losses on your own side, with the other side so defeated as to present few problems in the future. A ‘perfect war’, then, might be one where there is capitulation and complete surrender without a shot being fired.
The world’s arms dealers will take a devastatingly different view. Their primary function, like that of any other industrial endeavour in a shareholder capitalist system, is to make money for shareholders while ensuring decent salaries and even more decent bonuses for the CEO and senior colleagues.
To them, a ‘perfect war’ is one that degenerates into a violent stalemate that creates an insatiable demand for arms and the replacement of worn-out equipment, while at the same time, each side constantly tries to improve its weaponry and tactics. Profit is placed over lives, though it is arguably better if the war has relatively low casualties so that public support remains high and the war – and the money it generates – can continue.
An even ‘better’ scenario for an arms dealer is selling arms to another country that’s engulfed in an everlasting war that their own country is not fighting, and better still if they are selling to both sides at the same time.
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Now carry over this line of argument to the real world of the early 21st century, and we come up with some unusual and appalling results. The US-led coalition’s war in Afghanistan was long, and the 20 years of conflict certainly helped the armourers in many countries make plenty of money, as did the shorter eight-year war in Iraq.
Neither war, though, proved particularly popular back home and both came to a catastrophic end, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and two countries wrecked – but there were still plenty of profits for the armourers.
Iraq actually turned out to be a more complicated war, with ISIS emerging rapidly from the chaos left by Western forces. By 2014 it had taken control of much of northern Iraq and Syria. A US-led coalition was rapidly put together to organise an intensive air war across the two countries, with thousands of airstrikes and cruise missile attacks over a four-year period until ISIS was crippled.
According to AirWars, some 30,000 targets were attacked using more than 100,000 missiles and guided bombs, and at least 60,000 people were killed. Some of these will have been ISIS paramilitaries, but thousands will have been civilians of all ages. However, hardly any Western military personnel were killed apart from occasional accidents, there was little media coverage except when cities such as Mosul and Raqqa were taken, so there was little public attention paid to what appeared – from a Western perspective – to be a successful war.
Even its ‘success’ is debatable, though, as around a thousand US troops are still in northern Syria, many more are in Iraq, coalition forces still carry out air strikes in both countries, and ISIS is expanding its links with like-minded Islamist paramilitaries across the Sahel and on to the DRC, Uganda and even Mozambique. That war is still not over, so the profits still roll in.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/arms-industry-shareholder-capitalism-perfect-war-syria-iraq-ukraine/
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