The Murderous Socialist Alchemy called "War"

by Will Grigg
Jul. 14, 2013

As the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan is drawn down, the Pentagon is preparing to demolish a huge operations center that was built for the Marines.

The facility, which is located in the country’s Helmand Province, cost at least $34 million to construct. Sprawling across the bleak and dusty landscape of southwestern Afghanistan, the base is the size of a football field. It has an ultra-modern operations center with tiered seating, a briefing theater, a state-of-the-art air conditioning system, and large, well-appointed offices. It has never been used, and never will be. Military commanders explained three years ago that the base wasn’t needed, but Washington insisted on paying the contractor to finish it nonetheless.

In Kandahar Province, the military recently finished a $45 million vehicle repair facility, which is now being used to sort through surplus equipment. In the northern part of the country can be found a partially completed consulate building that has been abandoned after an expenditure of $80 million. It was decided that the outpost would be vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

As General Smedley Butler pointed out decades ago, war is a racket. It is a perverse form of corporate socialist alchemy in which irreplaceable human lives are transmuted into corrupt profits for politically connected opportunists.