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A match made in Hell
Prince, Trump and some possible plans for Afghanistan
...Prince’s plan to fund occupations by pillage would otherwise be simply an insane notion howled from the wilderness of policy thought were it not for Prince’s proximity to the president and Trump’s repeated assertion that the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil to recoup costs. Indeed in his first speech in his first full day in office, speaking at the CIA headquarters, Trump revived his campaign-season idea of taking Iraqi oil, even telling the audience, “maybe you’ll have another chance.”
But Prince’s innovations on the straight occupy-and-plunder model might excite Trump and his team far more, since it fully neoliberalizes war and occupation into a sleek corporate form, taking those vast Pentagon outlays off the federal budget and opening up those ventures to investment. It’s war that pays for itself! It’s likely an attractive prospect for a party whose central passions are to cut taxes and privatize government services.
...But if anyone knows about relegating matters of state to the hunger for profit it’s President Trump, whose extant ties to his business interests already complicate the constitutionality of his dealings. In the same way that his intelligence memos are more interesting to the president when his name is included more often, it could well be that making matters of state into matters of profit speaks to the president in a way that workaday statecraft, even the command of an empire, cannot. Might it be that, for the real-estate-mogul-turned-president, making countries into properties makes sense? Might it be that Prince, certainly Trump’s intellectual superior, knows this?
...We’ve witnessed the tension of military and money since Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, the introduction of capitalist profit into war-making and the predictable effect of an ever-expanding national security state at odds with the founders’ intentions. But Eisenhower’s critique of the arms industry only hinted at what a full subsumption of war by capital might become. A hypothetical American South Asia Company would have no more desire to end an occupation than Toyota would have to stop selling cars or Apple to stop selling electronics. It would, like any other corporation, seek sustenance and expansion. As Prince admitted to Carlson, the aims and objectives of war would immediately shift to “the arteries that make money.” Our problem, says Prince, is that we went to Afghanistan with the intention of combating terrorism, not seeking profit. Our problem, he suggests, is that we went to Afghanistan with the intention of leaving.
But Prince’s innovations on the straight occupy-and-plunder model might excite Trump and his team far more, since it fully neoliberalizes war and occupation into a sleek corporate form, taking those vast Pentagon outlays off the federal budget and opening up those ventures to investment. It’s war that pays for itself! It’s likely an attractive prospect for a party whose central passions are to cut taxes and privatize government services.
...But if anyone knows about relegating matters of state to the hunger for profit it’s President Trump, whose extant ties to his business interests already complicate the constitutionality of his dealings. In the same way that his intelligence memos are more interesting to the president when his name is included more often, it could well be that making matters of state into matters of profit speaks to the president in a way that workaday statecraft, even the command of an empire, cannot. Might it be that, for the real-estate-mogul-turned-president, making countries into properties makes sense? Might it be that Prince, certainly Trump’s intellectual superior, knows this?
...We’ve witnessed the tension of military and money since Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, the introduction of capitalist profit into war-making and the predictable effect of an ever-expanding national security state at odds with the founders’ intentions. But Eisenhower’s critique of the arms industry only hinted at what a full subsumption of war by capital might become. A hypothetical American South Asia Company would have no more desire to end an occupation than Toyota would have to stop selling cars or Apple to stop selling electronics. It would, like any other corporation, seek sustenance and expansion. As Prince admitted to Carlson, the aims and objectives of war would immediately shift to “the arteries that make money.” Our problem, says Prince, is that we went to Afghanistan with the intention of combating terrorism, not seeking profit. Our problem, he suggests, is that we went to Afghanistan with the intention of leaving.
http://www.salon.com/2017/06/03/erik-princes-dark-plan-for-afghanistan-military-occupation-for-profit-not-security/
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