By: Brianne Cate
More than 50 years after his 1961 Farewell Speech, President Eisenhower’s warning of the military-industrial complex rings truer than ever before. An ever-increasing ability to mass produce weapons of war coupled with the growing interconnectedness of markets has led to a pressing need for inquiry into what is truly lying behind aggressive government policymaking and cover ups of heinous crimes. It is an undeniable fact that this phenomenon is an integral part of the United States’ foreign policy agenda, but has its effects also permeated multinational organizations?
The military-industrial complex (MIC) has been described as the “Iron Triangle”–an essentially economic relationship between the legislators, armed forces, and private industry that lends support to all entities. Many political analysts have argued that this relationship is a major cause of traditional wars, proxy wars, third party wars, and corruption scandals. The origins of the concept can be traced back to the British East India Trading Company, where companies forced profits through colonization while those involved in the MIC manufactured weapons of iron and steel.
One need not be very imaginative to be able to assume how far the network has stretched since then. The MIC has been pushing American foreign policy since lobbying politicians became a viable option, but three instances stand out as the most recent: the push for bombing Syrian forces, the Iraqi War, and the invasion and subsequent enforcement of the no-fly zone in Libya. Syrian journalists have accused the MIC as the culprit behind the push to bomb government bases. After all, bombs are manufactured by certain corporations for profit. These Syrians have accused capitalist-minded industries of lobbying the Pentagon so that their products are bought, to ensure the accumulation of profit.
As for the Iraqi War, it is becoming more and more apparent to the American public that the accusations of terrorists having weapons of mass destruction were unfounded, and some political analysts are contesting the cemented fact that Usama bin Laden was even connected to the Sept. 11 attacks at all. Assuming these statements are factual, former President Bush’s primary reasons for the invasion are rendered fallible and others, such as the MIC, gain credibility. There were even a few instances of accounting errors, named as corruption by some, that cost the Pentagon millions.
Lastly, it had been estimated in 2011 that the enforcement of the no-fly zone in Libya was costing U.S. taxpayers approximately $2 billion a day. These are the prices that must be paid to keep industries producing the weapons that are currently maintaining global hegemony—and the prices that are putting the country into a steady state of decline.
But that’s not the argument being conveyed here. One cannot deny that the MIC is greatly affecting U.S. policy abroad, but is corporate infiltration also contributing to scandals in multinational entities as well? One such scandal stands above many of the others in terms of depth and publicity: Kathryn Bolkovac’s investigation into United Nation peacekeepers’ promulgation of the sex slave trade in former Yugoslavia. A recent film was made, called “The Whistleblower”, which brought to light Dyncorp’s, a U.S.-based private military contractor, role in the string of scandals. Perpetrators, most of them contracted by Dyncorp, of these rapes, often of children, are usually never prosecuted, and if they are then they are merely repatriated as punishment. As Bolkovac began to dig deeper into the corruption, she was steadily demoted. When her outrage finally became too much to bear, she wrote an open email to U.N. and Dyncorp officials, which led to her being fired. Despite winning the lawsuit against Dyncorp industries for wrongful termination, Mrs. Bolkovac feels unsatisfied, as, nothing more than enacting a zero tolerance policy has been done since to restrict private corporations influence over the intergovernmental body. The U.S. State Department continues to use Dyncorp to send police officers on peacekeeping missions.
To state that the MIC is at the root of all corruption in the United States and abroad would be far-fetched and simply inaccurate. The United States is under no threat of a military coup or of policymakers becoming puppets of arms producers, but the truth is that the intense relationship within the MIC accounts for part of the reason that the United States is in a constant state of over-preparation for war, and for why scandal is so readily concealed. To discover the dearth of the relationship would be to unearth troubling implications for the future of democracies and intergovernmental entities—themselves supposed champions of unalienable freedoms and rights. Acknowledging this network, and the fact that it will persist whether citizens want it to or not, is the first step in deciding whether policies are being enacted for their announced reasons, and whether they will take us in the direction we want to go.
