On this fifth anniversary of George Bush's attack on Iraq, I want to call attention to someone we don't hear about enough.

Smedley Butler reached the rank of major general in the U.S. Marine Corps. He lied about his age to join the Marines at age 16 in 1898 when the USA declared war against Spain and served all over the world (including France in World War I). Wikipedia lists all the medals he received for heroism.

Butler retired from active duty in 1931 and gave speeches to pacifist groups, becoming known as a critic of war profiteering. His book War Is a Racket was published in 1935. What he wrote is achingly true today. From chapter 1:

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War [I]....

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

He says the territory won by nations in war is exploited by "the few" and the "bill" is paid by the general public.

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

Does any of this sound familiar?

He died in 1940, before World War II. Surely stopping Hitler and being attacked by the Japanese had nothing to do with profiteering, did it? But here's what Butler wrote seven years before Pearl Harbor:

Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war – a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

There are persistent theories that Franklin Roosevelt's administration knew about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor and did nothing to prevent it. The attack gave him the excuse and public backing he needed to enter the war.

Every paragraph in Butler's small book is quotable; I'm tempted to cut and paste the whole thing, but of course I can't. I hope you'll go to the link and read it there. In chapter 1, he talks about how much wars have increased the national debt. In chapter 2, he names companies who have profited from war and tells how much they profited.

In chapter 3, he talks about the costs paid by the soldiers and their families: deaths, men in veterans hospitals he considers "living dead" and men who have been trained to "think nothing at all of killing or of being killed" who "had to do their own readjustment, sans mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda." Has anything changed?

He describes how soldiers were ripped off in World War I: they were conscripted and paid $30 a month. Half was taken to support thier dependents, they had to pay $6 for their own "accident" insurance and they were pressured into spending the remaining $9 on Liberty Bonds. They bought the bonds at $100 each, and when they got back and couldn't find work they had to sell them back for $84 to $86.

What about the National Guard troops who recently were returned from active duty one day short of qualifying for educational benefits? Or the soldiers injured in Iraq or Afghanistan who were billed for their meals while they were in the hospital and/or told they had to pay back their enlistment bonuses when they were injured "too soon"?

Butler also recognized that the family pays too—in heartbreak and the costs of paying for the damaged ones who came back. We now have parents and spouses quitting jobs and spending retirement accounts to take care of wounded soldiers since our government isn't doing it.

The profiteering in Iraq seems more blatant than anything we've seen before. Butler's recommendations for change are appealing but not likely to be adopted: making everyone in the nation, including the politicians and profiteers, work for soldiers' pay for 30 days before declaring war, having the young men who would have to fight in the war vote on whether to declare war or not and requiring that we only go to war to defend our country.

However, his book gave me a new view of what is really going on now. Why did we attack Iraq? Follow the money.