{"id":19795,"date":"2016-04-11T13:22:30","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T18:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19795"},"modified":"2016-04-11T13:23:06","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T18:23:06","slug":"19795","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19795","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: William Hartung, What a Waste, the U.S. Military"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: William Hartung, What a Waste, the U.S. Military<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Late last year, I spent some time\u00a0digging into<\/a>\u00a0the Pentagon\u2019s \u201creconstruction\u201d efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries it invaded in 2001 and 2003 in tandem with a chosen crew of\u00a0warrior corporations<\/a>. As a story of fabled American can-do in distant lands, both proved genuinely dismal no-can-do tales, from roads built (that instantly started\u00a0crumbling<\/a>) to police academies constructed (that proved to be\u00a0health hazards<\/a>) to prisons begun (that were\u00a0never finished<\/a>) to schools constructed (that remained\u00a0uncompleted<\/a>)\u00a0to small arms transfers (that were \u201clost\u201d in transit<\/a>) to armies built, trained, and equipped for\u00a0stunning sums<\/a>\u00a0(that\u00a0collapsed<\/a>).\u00a0 It was as if nothing the Pentagon touched turned to anything but dross (including the\u00a0never-ending wars<\/a>\u00a0it fought).\u00a0 All of it added up to what I then labeled a massive \u201c$cam<\/a>\u201d with American taxpayer money lost in amounts that staggered the imagination.<\/p>\n

All of that came rushing back as I read\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>\u00a0regular<\/a>\u00a0William Hartung\u2019s latest post on \u201cwaste\u201d at the Pentagon.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t just happen in Kabul and Baghdad; it\u2019s been going on right here in the good old USA for, as Hartung recounts, the last five decades.\u00a0 There\u2019s only one difference I can see: in Kabul, Baghdad, or any other capital in the Greater Middle East and Africa, if we saw far smaller versions of such \u201cwaste\u201d indulged in by the elites of those countries, we would call it \u201ccorruption<\/a>\u201d without blinking.\u00a0 So here\u2019s my little suggestion, as you read Hartung: think about just how deeply what once would have been considered a Third World-style of corruption is buried in the very heart of our system and in the way of life of the military-industrial complex.\u00a0 By now, President\u00a0Dwight Eisenhower<\/a>\u00a0must be tossing and turning in his grave.\u00a0Tom<\/em><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: William Hartung, What a Waste, the U.S. Military Late last year, I spent some time\u00a0digging into\u00a0the Pentagon\u2019s \u201creconstruction\u201d efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries it invaded in 2001 and 2003 in tandem with a chosen crew of\u00a0warrior corporations. As a story of fabled American can-do in distant lands, both proved genuinely dismal no-can-do tales, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[528,529,7413,844,13403],"class_list":["post-19795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-military-spending","tag-tomdispatch","tag-us-military","tag-william-hartung"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19795"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19797,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19795\/revisions\/19797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}