War profiteers used to be shot. Over thousands of years, from the ancient Greece through the age of Louis IV and WWI,profiteering from war has been equivalent to treason. Not in the GW Bush era. Scheer shows how milking the taxpayer has become modus operandi of the 43rd Administration...to the tune of $ trillions!

While the funds spent on education, health care, transportation and job creation were slashed, the Republicans orchestrated one of the greatest scams in the history of mankind (in terms of funds steered from the public to private hands). GWB tore up arms control treaties and spent hundreds of billions on needless weapons to the levels EXCEEDING the highest level of Cold War spending. Scheer documents how these weapon's programs were pursued solely to benefit specific defense contractors. Conventional military received 89% even though the enemies defined by 9/11 attacks have no conventional army and certainly no air force. The spending for homeland security, on the other hand, increased by seven (7) percent and let us not forget the pinnacle of this pathetic presidency, when GWB, the - ahem - compassionate conservative - vetoed $7 billion for expansion of federal children health care insurance plan as too costly.

What staggers is the sheer magnitude of greed and brazeness involved, especially the neoconservatives who gloated in shameless promotion of their agenda. The neocons - Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Elliot Abrams, Wolfowitz, Kissinger - hit the trifecta: they became part of GW Bushes government (many sitting on the infamous Defense Policy Board and JINSA) while associating with defense companies (sitting on THEIR boards) and cultivating close ties with Israel's Netanyahu's clicque and their corrupt American supporters a la Conrad Black and Abramowitz. No lie was big enough for these people.... the public was forced to go along with it because of massive indoctrination, fear of being called unpatriotic ... and because of Democrat support. Here is what Thomas Friedman, an early and enthusiastic proponent of the war, wrote in NYT:

"...The only way to puncture that bubble [[of terrorism]] was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could."

"we"? "our"? i don't see Friedman or Kristol or Podhoretz paying the price of war. Their kids went to Harvard, unlike the thousands of maimed American soldiers from small hamlets in Nevada or Pennsylvania and hundreds of thousands of killed Iraqis. After things started to go awry, Friedman morphed into a critic of GWB and the war and Ari Fleishman promptly resigned. Shameless, actually. Anyway...while most (if not all) the neocons are in some capacity or other associated with Israel's Likud interests (as opposed to Clintonista neoliberals who are tied to Israel's Labour party), Scheer suggests that the link is not always straightforward. Some neocon activities - such as championing the military interests of Saudi Arabia and Jordan - were opposed to Israel's wishes while massively fattening neocon pockets. Even for Perle, ideology only goes so far.

The war profiteers made sure they will not be sent to jail by enlisting the Clinton machine on the Dem side. Perhaps one of the most illuminating - and scary - part of the book reveals the role these "liberals" (or "neoliberals" as Scheer calls them) supported the orgy of war profiteering. Joe Liebermann, California's Feinstein and Boxer, John Kerry and above all, the Clintons have colluded from the outset with the warmongers. Scarily, the same names crop up today: the champions of war such Richard Holbrooke, Kenneth Pollack (on Clinton's National Security Council), Martin Indyk (Clinton's Ambassador to Israel), Hillary, Allbright, Dennis Ross, Michael O'Hanlon are the very people who have been given the reins of US Foreign Policy to come. Nothing if not alarming.

American Foreign policy can be seen as tension between two very different traditions: a relatively sophisticated and enlightened one represented by Eisenhower and his "disciples" (Nixon, George Bush senior) who see the world as multipolar and foreign policy based on the art of negotiation and their slightly nutty counterparts (Reagan, GWB) who see the world as black and white. The war profiteers thrived because they were able to fan an uneducated president's simplistic worldview. Is this going to change?

War profiteers used to be shot. Or jailed. Is Obama going to break the corrupt links between the defense contractors, policy think-tanks and the government? Is he going to cut the lobbyists out of the pork game? Is he going to rein in the senators who champion parochial interests over those of the country? Rein in AIPAC's stranglehold on US foreign policy? Or will it be ... business as usual?

So why does Boeing insist on making the wasteful and unneccessary C-17 military transport when not even the Pentagon wants it. Why not, for example, build civilian transports instead. Well, it's really a no-brainer, as they say. The C-17 pumps out a profit margin of 13 %, while the most profitable of airliners, the 747, earns less than 5% (p. 97). Think what that profit differential does for Boeing on Wall Street or for executive stock bonuses. And though Scheer doesn't mention it, military contractors don't have to claw as hard for the same buck as civilian outfits.

Then too, it's not like the C-17 is an isolated case. Think super-sophisticated jet fighters and cutting-edge submarines, all the billions being spent to defeat guys with razor blades and cell phones. There's a disconnect somewhere, but then maybe we're missing the dots. The book zeroes in on our now notorious military-industrial (& congressional) complex, showing how it's become all stomach and no brain, feasting like Frankenstein on the national treasury with no comparable enemy in sight. No wonder that despite our forefathers, we go in search of dragons to slay and where there are only toads, we make them into dragons. In short, our Frankenstein creation is running amok and feeds only on cash dollars.

Scheer's book reads more like an longer version of his late, lamented op-ed's in the LA Times, i.e. before the Tribune Co. decided he'd become bad for business and put a nice safe centrist in his place. Nonetheless, the story can't be told often enough. Of all discretionary spending (non-entitlement), 59% goes for the Pentagon, while the other 41% is for everything else, like health, transportation, education, and so on (p. 169). No wonder levees break, bridges fall down, and we rank somewhere behind Luxembourg in math and science.

Of course, the budget-gobbling monster couldn't continue without its shills in congress, the Pentagon, and corporate- sponsored think tanks. It's the Richard Perle, Barbara Boxer-type stories that the book also tells-- these little Igor's that keep the creature's pulse going. However, the author really doesn't face up to the problem of how we get out of this unsustainable war-making economy. Just where are the comparable civilian jobs when Corporate America is moving overseas and leaving us Walmart instead. No, we're in a pickle that's been building for some time and we best face up to it. The era of American exceptionalism is over. The empire we've built of which the military-industrial Frankenstein is the over-sized muscle is beginning to feast on us too. And only an aroused citizenry with pitchforks can turn up the heat to corral the monster in our midst.