Warriors, guns, and money, continued

by Jason Vest

Q: When you started on this project, did you have any idea how profoundly weird some of the people and situations you'd be reporting on would be?

A: No. I was very surprised. On some level, I certainly expected it to be a somewhat weird, creepy world, but I never expected to encounter someone like Sheila Petrie, a former stripper who sold whiskey and French locomotives to Idi Amin. Or members of the British royal family involved in the gun trade. Even some of the more "mainstream" characters were fairly flaky. But as this great cast of characters emerged, it did make for fun research.

Q: This isn't a world whose inhabitants take kindly to prying eyes. Were you ever concerned about your safety?

A: I never really felt frightened, exactly. I'd rather not say of whom, but there were a couple of individuals -- none of the main characters in the book, but secondary characters -- who I did worry about, and who I thought might . . . let's just say they're not the sort of people whose bad side you want to be on.

Q: Do they still live by the "ends justify the means" jihad mentality of the Cold War?

A: The Cold War mentality was one of the great dogmas of the 20th century, and those who lived by it and believed in it were equivalent to the Communist Party apparatchiks they were so opposed to. And in some ways, they've had a hard time changing with the times.

That whole dogma was an uncritical acceptance of US military posture, an unwillingness to examine ideology, an uncritical embrace of greater degrees of military expenditure and power. And they've brought that dogma to a world which no longer exists. To suggest we're living in a time as militarily menacing as the Cold War is ludicrous. True, there's a whole lot of scary things out there, but the things that are there -- chemical and biological terrorism -- you're not going to confront with a $300 billion military budget.

Q: Is it fair to say that in order to understand the world of military affairs today, you can't forget the Cold War, because its precepts are still there?

A: Exactly. What I found in reporting was the revelation of a certain fanaticism that I suppose was always visible, but now is more visible. And I think my reporting also shows the Cold War ideologues as players who had a personal stake in their own views. For example, the Pentagon bureaucrat who was constantly harping on the Soviet threat -- which collapsed in one fell swoop and was revealed to be rotting from the inside out -- had a stake in exaggerating and inflaming it. The gun runners had a personal interest in creating and promulgating the view that the world was a terribly dangerous place for the US, that the nation must buy arms, that the CIA must do covert ops. The level of threat we were afraid of turned out to have been wildly overblown.

I'm not saying everyone I interviewed or wrote about is a liar or a crook out to feather their own nest. Some are good people, people worthy of admiration. I don't think everyone did everything [just] to make a buck. But they were always dishonestly promoting programs or ideas.

Q: Which still persists today.

A: Take Gaffney. A hard-liner from the Reagan administration, big Star Wars promoter -- the idea that it would work perfectly was always ludicrous, and if it doesn't, what good is it? So 98 missiles don't make it through, but two do? The idea that you can make it work perfectly is stupid. It was always promoted with a pack of lies. Sixty billion dollars later, what is there to show for it? Gaffney's funded by defense companies that have billions at stake. I consider that corrupt. But I don't want to tar everyone with this brush. When you have a $300 billion defense budget, with a lot of people making good money, it corrupts everything. The intellectual side of these programs, the testing side -- I mean, my God, the tests have been rigged to the point of having to help the defense system find the rocket.

Q: Where's the line between being a true believer and a self-interested money grubber?

A: That's very difficult to answer, because you'd need to put Gaffney and a bunch of these guys through hours of therapy to determine if they actually believe the lies they put out. Some of them certainly do believe it. But it's a tricky question, because even if they do believe it, the evidence is so overwhelming -- how long is it going to be before people realize a ballistic-missile defense is not going to work properly? There's no need to promote it when it's clear it's not going to do what it's supposed to. What Gaffney believes becomes irrelevant, because there's no reason to believe it. But getting to the very roots of all these people -- that would require years of analysis.

Q: What's your take on the Clinton administration and how it's responded to these changes?

A: It's done very little to reverse the policies of the Cold War. Clinton promised the Star Wars project would be killed way back when, but it hasn't. He's . . . stalling to let his successor decide. Certainly if you look at the defense budget, he's done almost nothing after it was time to put the Cold War behind us, he's done very little to do that. This administration gets pretty low grades.

Q: Is fostering the rise of private military companies (PMCs) like MPRI part of that? Isn't there some wisdom or legitimacy to experimenting with this concept?

A: I don't think so. In Rwanda, for example, where the US didn't want to get involved -- people have said, "Why not put in a private mercenary firm, with a few hundred soldiers, a few helicopters, and put an end to it?" That's true, you could have, but why from a private firm? Even a small African contingent backed by more powerful nations could have done it. You don't need PMCs. These companies go where the money goes -- who's going to pay to stop Rwandan genocide?

What strikes me as most naive is that these firms are run, for the most part, by retired hawks and hard-liners who made their names during the Cold War, and the idea . . . that suddenly, in the private sector, they're going to behave responsibly is absolutely stupid. They are going to go where the money is, they are going to go and support the same regimes they supported in the Cold War. I believe it's naive in a crazy way. You expect MPRI is going to come in and be hired to overthrow the Suharto regime? Who's going to hire them? The people who pay lip service to "ethical foreign policy"? I don't think so. And I don't think human-rights [non-governmental organizations] want to start doing that, either. Dictators have authoritarian regimes and are trying to make sure they stay in power. Usually the money is in the wrong hands.

Q: During the Kosovo crisis, progressives were split on intervention. Do you think the intervention advocates appreciated -- or even considered -- the vested interests of defense procurement?

A: Absolutely not, and that was one of the scary things about calls from liberals for intervention in Kosovo. People think this was a humanitarian intervention. This opens up a whole can of worms. The US has always used this claim to justify use of force. And there are certainly cases where use of force is justified.

But just like the Gulf War, the Kosovo intervention allowed the US to roll out its supposedly brilliant high-tech arsenal. In both cases, the effective use of high-tech weapons was inflated. The Serbs shot down a Stealth [aircraft] with a missile that dates back to 1963. Time after time, we found our high-tech weapons not nearly as effective. They couldn't see through clouds. They couldn't pick out enemy targets. The kill figures for the Serbs were highly inflated. An entire army that rolled in rolled back out. Only a handful of tanks were killed.

Yet on the nightly news, it appeared that the stuff was working brilliantly. And this gives aid and comfort to the Pentagon, which can go to the public and say, "See how brilliant our weapons are? We didn't lose any soldiers!" And this creates a momentum for building up new weapons systems and funneling more money to arms contractors. In that sense, Kosovo was a huge PR success for the Pentagon, just like the war in the Gulf. Purely in military terms, they obviously overwhelmed their opponent. But that didn't have a lot to do with high-tech weaponry. All we proved was that we can bomb the shit out of a small country, which was the same thing the Germans did to the Spanish at Guernica.

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Jason Vest is a Washington-based investigative reporter and a contributing editor for In These Times.