Terrorism is great for business if you’re in the business of growing the government leviathan. The bodies in Paris are not yet buried, while the vultures with dollar signs (and pounds and Euros, etc) in their eyes have already swooped down for a feast.
Terrorism, what is it good for?
1) The military-industrial-Congressional complex: Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for bringing to light the enormous profits that are already rolling in for the merchants of death as Paris still smolders. As Greenwald points out, the markets could hardly wait to start buying from these military suppliers:
And France’s largest arms manufacturer:
2) The surveillance/spy state: This morning UK prime minister David Cameron announced that, in light of the Paris attacks, an additional 2,000 spies will be hired in Britain’s MI5, MI6, and GCHQ. The British are among the most spied-upon people on the planet, and with a 15 percent increase in spy hires they can look forward to having even more of their private lives in view of government snoops, as well as their civil liberties further clipped in the name of freedom. Cameron calls ramping up the surveillance state “invest[ing] more in our national security,” but does anyone believe an even larger spy bureaucracy will keep Britain safe?
3) The regime-change interventionists: Still in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron is planning, in light of the Paris attacks, to greatly expand British training of rebels to fight in Syria. The 85 British troops already training “moderate” rebels in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan are “woefully insufficient,” according to former chief of the defense staff, Lord Richards. In Saudi Arabia, the British are training the much-touted but rarely-sighted Free Syrian Army, which has the Assad government as its primary target. Anyone who believes those passing through this ramped-up British military training program are not going to focus on removing the Assad government rather than fighting ISIS are drinking far too much government-supplied Kool-Aid.
4) Washington’s foaming-at-the-mouth-troops-on-the-ground faction: Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are demanding a US ground force of 80-100,000 US soldiers to invade Syria with the unenviably complex task of wiping out ISIS, clearing out Russia, and tossing out Syrian President Assad. That should leave….what exactly? The mythical rainbow unicorn called “pro-democracy” to take up running the place. Kind of like what was supposed to happen in Libya. But it will work this time, they promise.
Bill Kristol has blown a gasket, quoting Winston Churchill about “total victory.” On This Week Sunday, he smirked that while “Americans are a little war weary and they’re worried about another intervention in the Middle East… If ISIS is going to be destroyed, America has to be in the lead… you are going to need troops on the ground.” He’d like to see 50,000 Americans go to war in Syria. Considering that State Department Spokesman John Kirby has asserted that ISIS’s presence in Syria is all Assad’s fault, it is not too difficult to see that Kristol’s army would “finish the job” in Syria by taking out its secular president Assad.
Yes, while the relatives of the slain are left to grieve, so many others are smiling and rubbing their hands together greedily. As Rahm Emmanuel once so famously said, “you never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
Terror attacks provide that opportunity and so many of the worst sort are rushing to capitalize on it.
