Do we have a society that depends on war?

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday March 16th, 2009

Have you seen the billboards around town with the fancy new military helicopter on them?

The message touts the benefits of defence contracts to the economy of New Brunswick; to the tune of some $130 million, and growing.

At the risk of biting the hand that feeds us, I am going to complain about this. Not that we are getting jobs, but how we are getting paid.

The Canadian Forces cost us about $19 billion a year. The Conservative government's first budget after taking office in 2006 increased defence spending by $5.3 billion over five years. The 2008 budget further committed to automatic annual increases in defence spending of two per cent, ensuring predictable funding and enabling long-term strategic planning.

It is actually hard to get a concrete figure on defence spending and contracts; as it is spread out quite a bit. Even Tim Horton's operates in Kandahar. We know, however, that hundreds of millions are channelled into companies that make anything from plastics to fighter jets.

Although we only spend a little over one per cent of our GDP on defence, by contrast Ottawa's current foreign-aid level is about 0.28 per cent of GDP.

These numbers sound miniscule, but it is important to keep them in mind, especially the fact that military spending is four times the spending on development work. That alone tells us about foreign policy. The stats are even more skewed in other countries. In truth, our primary method of relating to each other is through the military, not through any peaceful sort of initiative.

Of course, the United States spends the most on its military and defence of any individual country. It staggers the mind to think how much money is spent on current military operations every single day. When I last looked the cost of the war in Iraq alone for the U.S. was listed at over $604 billion dollars, and rising at $341 million per day.

And just for laughs consider that the U.S. Government Accountability Office had examined 95 major defence projects in 2008 and found cost overruns totalling $295 billion.

The U.S. military is the single largest consumer of energy in the world. It burns more jet fuel and diesel gas, for example, then the entire country of Nigeria.

The Roman statesman Cicero once said, "Nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam." ("Endless money forms the sinews of war.")

Our economy is dependent on us being at war. Way back when George Orwell predicted a world in his novel 1984 that actually manufactured war to keep the world running smoothly. I wonder if we are already there.

Just War Theory says that there must be a direct proportional response to any sort of provocation. Simply put this is a complex form of an eye for an eye. So 2,974 people died in the attacks on 9/11. This prompted the so-called war on terror which led to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stats on how many Iraqi and Afghani citizens have been violently killed as a response come in at a low figure of 180,000 and a high, as researched by the English Medical Journal Lancet, of over a million.

The reasons given for the invasions were firstly to capture Osama Bin Laden; which has not been accomplished, and secondly to wipe out the weapons of mass destruction, which never existed in the first place.

So we have military conflict based on non-existent reasons, in a non-proportional way, costing us our livelihood.

To what end?

I know most people have heard conspiracy theories galore about all of this. Maybe there is a secret cadre ruling the world, who are fighting over God knows what. Or perhaps this is all about oil and nothing else.

Maybe the war is meant to distract us from what is really going on somewhere else, sort of a sleight of hand.

I am not an actual conspiracy theory sort of guy, most of the time, so I want to suggest that the reason is as obvious as the billboard.

That $130 million is a good chunk of change to spend on companies in New Brunswick. And we are by no means alone in this. I wonder if there is a single company in the Western hemisphere that does not somehow profit from military spending. Oil companies certainly do. As do food providers, construction companies, trucking and transport, as well as infrastructure.

The entire Interstate system in the United States can partly be blamed on needing an internal military supply route in case of invasion.

Without wars, most of us would have nothing to do. That is perhaps overstated, but also very real, and very frightening to those who depend on all this spending.

Do we have any chance of ending conflict? Certainly not until we solve the problem of economic dependencies, and really, what incentive is there to do that?

None of us want the economy to get worse, so, let's make sure the fighting does.