War: How to Profit While Others Wage It

War was the business of the barbarians, Romans said:

Their feet were laced in boots of bristly hide reaching to the heels; ankles and legs were exposed. They wore high tight tunics of varied color hardly descending to their bare knees, the sleeves covering only the upper arm. Green mantles they had with crimson borders; baldrics supported swords hung from their shoulders, and pressed on sides covered with cloaks of skin secured by brooches. No small part of their adornment consisted of their arms; in their hands they grasped barbed spears and missile axes; their left sides were guarded by shields, which flashed tawny golden bosses and snowy silver borders…. Though the business at hand was wedlock, Mars was no whit less prominent in all this pomp than Venus. Sidonius, Book IV, Letter XXI, AD 472; a Frankish wedding.

Attila the Hun was a recruiter for the war machine of the western Roman Empire. His predecessor, King Rugila supplied warriors to Flavius Aetius early in his career, and Aetius, magister militum utriusque militiae, or General of the field army of the western Roman Empire for much of the period from 425 until his murder in 455, used Huns as the core of his war troops, at least until Attila attacked Gaul in 451.

Aetius, sometimes referred to as "the last of the Romans," and perhaps the last Roman general to hold off the barbarians, married a Gothic princess, and sent his son, Gaudentius, as hostage to the Huns in 425. He had been a hostage, himself, to both the Huns and the Visigoths, hence his close relations with both.

The barbarians fought war on both sides, sometimes for the Romans (paid by them, under overall Roman command) and sometimes against them. Alaric, the Goth, who sacked Rome in 410, after besieging it for a year, had earlier served in war as a Roman auxiliary. In fact, his people had been settled in the western Balkans as security for the Roman frontier on the Danube, and they had joined the war on the side of Emperor Theodosius against Eugenius, a usurper in Italy. The Visigoths became discontented because Theodosius had deployed them in front of other forces during the worst battles of the war, causing much higher casualties than among other troops--at least that was the claim. As a consequence, Alaric, unhappy at being passed over for a promotion, agitated among his people and was elected war-leader, later King. Under him the Visigoths revolted, rampaged through Thrace and Macedonia, then avoided Constantinople, and pillaged Greece--through a political deal with Stilicho, the Vandal-Roman general who controlled the western Roman army until 409, and, separately, they made a deal with the chief minister of the eastern Roman Empire. In fact, the Visigoths were spared twice because of political maneuvering between eastern and western Roman leaders, and they continued their anti-Roman war rampage, the climax of which, more than ten years later, was the sack of Rome. The Visigoths were not settled until finally, years later, they established control over southern Gaul and all of Spain. For years in the latter period they were again federates of Rome, that is bound by treaty to provide troops (to fight as auxilia) in the Roman armies--until they again rebelled and took over as independent kingdoms in southern Gaul and Spain.

The Vandals, too, after devastating much of Spain, were invited by Boniface, Count of Africa, to fight a war for him in Africa--in order to fend off the armies of his rival, the same General Aetius. The Vandals conquered North Africa from Rome (turning on Boniface, of course), depriving Rome of political control over its food supply, and gaining near control of the western Mediterranean, the sea Romans had called Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) and Mare Internum (Internal Sea).

The point of this much abbreviated war history is that Roman armies were hardly Roman by the latter part of the fourth century. Also, the "barbarian invasions" did not look like the invasions we know about today; they were more about peoples wandering across borders, looking for pillage and settlement both, and often fighting wars for their hosts. Most of the generals of both Roman empires were Romanized barbarians like Stilicho (a Vandal), and Ricimer (a Frank). In fact Flavius Aetius was an exception but he was clearly "barbarized." Both eastern and western armies were dominated by Germans of various tribes, but the tribes themselves did not remain reliably under Roman control, and even the fearsome Huns played an important role in the Roman war machine. The less civilized people were--whether Roman subjects or barbarians from beyond the Empire--the more they were prized by the Roman army. Roman subjects of Italy, Greece, Africa and the cities of western Asia were ignored as too civilized, too beaten down or effete to be prime sources of recruitment.

It would be as if we allied with fundamentalist Arabs and Afghans to fight a war against a common foe in Afghanistan and then they turned on us--ah but we did, didn't we and they have, haven't they! In fact, since 1987, a US visa official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia stated that the US CIA had been covertly issuing visas to unqualified applicants, bringing them to the US for training to fight in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and that five of this number turned up as hijackers on 9/11.

Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization have taken credit for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and many other attacks in Europe, and he continues to issue threats to the US, but it bears remembering that Osama was, for a long time, not only an indirect recipient of American aid and training, but that his organization was seen as an integral part of the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. Later his organization was also seen as our proxy in various wars in the Balkans, and in the process of creating Muslim states out of the former Soviet Union that would be beyond Russian control.

Osama first became a jihadi, or sacred warrior for Islam, in the struggle pitting Muslim mujahadeen, against a Soviet-influenced Afghan government. The recruitment of about 35,000 Muslim radicals to fight the Soviet-Afghan war on the side of the mujahadeen was carried out by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), but with the active support, or tutelage, of the US CIA. In fact, ISI's use of Islam in training as a counter to Soviet ideology was CIA-inspired. It hit on the idea that Islam was a complete socio-political system that was being violated by the Soviet-backed regime.

Talk about blow-back! The warriors who went into the field against the Soviets would later turn around and claim the same thing of the US in Saudi Arabia, where we later stationed troops; our presence was violating Islam, a total socio-political system, hence, according to Al Qaeda, the attacks of 9/11.

Osama bin Laden was probably not aware that the ISI was carrying out CIA directions, and providing aid from the CIA, but still he went through a long process before becoming an enemy of the Americans. In the Mujahadeen war, he gathered forces largely from his homeland, Saudi Arabia, and used his money, and construction equipment from his family's firm (the largest construction firm in Saudi Arabia), to build bases (al Qaeda means The Base) in Afghanistan, from which the people he recruited and trained went out to battle the Soviet forces. It was not until the US sent troops to Saudi Arabia, during the first Iraq war that he began to work against both the US and the Saudi Kingdom, and it was not until he returned to Afghanistan in 1996, after stays in Saudi Arabia and the Sudan, that he declared war against the US.

However, he did get his start, and his activists gained their training and some of their financial support from the ISI. It is also ironic to note that much of the covert activity supported or sponsored by the CIA through the ISI was financed by the heroin trade from the "golden triangle;" most of the world's and the US's heroin comes from there.

When the Taliban gained power in Afghanistan, their open and active support of bin Laden was only one of the reasons why the US finally saw them as antithetical to American interests: the Taliban also closed the heroin trade (completely!) and, finally, they refused to agree to an oil pipeline traversing their territory. If there hadn't been the attack of 9/11, there might have been some other pretext found for war and for overthrowing them.

And then there is Iraq. It's common knowledge that Saddam Hussein was "our guy" in the Persian Gulf, enlisted in part because of all the oil Iraq was sitting on, but also because he was secular, and therefore a counter-force to the Iranian Islamic revolution next door. He received intelligence and weapons aid from the US during the Iran-Iraq war, and until he invaded Kuwait. This includes the period when he gassed the Kurdish villagers in his own country.

As for Kuwait, Saddam may have thought he had gotten the go-ahead from the US to invade, because the US Ambassador at the time, April Glaspie, had told him: relations between Arab countries were "not our affair."

It is possible (some sources say this, others don't) that President George H.W. Bush had no position on the Kuwait invasion until Margaret Thatcher (UK Prime Minister) urged him to counter it; that he needed a splendid little war to gain political support. That conversation supposedly took place when he was on a weekend retreat with her in Colorado, just after Thatcher had triumphed in the Falklands War and had been convincingly re-elected on the strength of her victory. The Persian Gulf War was to be Bush I's ticket to re-election. In other words, our military policy is about as entangled with "the barbarians" as was the Roman military in the fifth century.

Like us, the Romans were superior in waging conventional war at least until 378--except that the nature of war changed as the barbarians flooded into Europe. At the battle of Adrianople in 378, east German cavalry successfully rode down the Roman infantry, completely defeating the Roman forces and killing Emperor Valens. After that the infantry, even the famed tortoise formation of the Roman legions, was no longer the match of armored cavalry.

Huns had light and heavy cavalry, the light cavalry highly maneuverable, on steppe ponies, fighters armed with light lances, swords, bow and arrow and lariats. Reportedly, Huns could shoot continuously while charging, retreating and charging again, and their arrows could pierce armor. Their bows were unique, composites of wood and bone, longer above than below to make them easier to use on horseback. The lariats were for taking prisoners. Their heavy cavalry was well-armored for a frontal charge.

The frontal charge was the specialty of the Goths, and especially of the Vandals, who rode large horses (Boniface had transported them across from Spain to what is now Morocco) and the Vandals were large themselves. The Ostrogoths charged with horses and young men running alongside them--to kill the enemy as he was unhorsed. None of the German tribes used bow and arrow from a horse; they thought it dishonorable (common people used bow and arrow, not the mounted nobility), but it was what made the Huns so deadly.

It took time for Roman armies to adapt to the new methods of waging war, but cavalry became more and more important, infantry less and less so; by the sixth century, the eastern Roman armies were all mounted. Some Roman cavalry even used bow and arrow like the Huns.

The major difference between the barbarian forces fighting the Romans and the barbarian-Roman army was the infrastructure behind the Roman war machine; it was better equipped and better supplied, because the Roman military system had developed supply routes, arms factories, and the tax system that we examined earlier, all in part to supply the army.

The greatest problem the Roman armies had is one the United States is just beginning to face: recruitment. By the fifth century, the Roman Army only recruited soldiers in the least civilized of its territories; elsewhere the inhabitants were deemed too effete and military service was no longer required. They didn't want to fight war continuously.

This was why barbarians became Roman soldiers to begin with, probably as early as the second century. Initially they were recruited individually, later as units under Roman officers, but by the fourth century whole barbarian units (tribal war-bands, really) were becoming part of the Roman field army as auxilia, under their own chiefs. One of Alaric's early ambitions was to become a magister militem so that he could receive regular Roman pay while fighting Rome's wars.

The process in US war-making has not gone as far (towards "barbarization"), in part because the physical hardships faced by a Roman soldier were much greater than those facing the mobile US army, based in camps, that have all the amenities even in war conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. They no longer require soldiers to carry out basic maintenance, like construction, or KP.

Still, from what parts of the country and elsewhere are US forces recruited? We do know that an estimated 31,000 foreign nationals are serving in the US military, a disproportionate number in the Iraq war, and that two foreign nationals, a Mexican and Guatemalan were posthumously awarded citizenship after being some of the first fatalities in the war. LA recruiters have said that half of all their recruits are resident aliens, and the fact that President Bush signed a fast-track process on July 4th, 2003 for US soldiers to become citizens has noticeably aided recruiters. On the other hand, the US South accounts for 40% of military enlistees, and only 15% comes from the US Northeast, which brings us back to the Roman experience: there were regions that were considered militarily superior, the Balkans being comparable to the US South, and others like Italy, Greece and the cities of Asia that were simply ignored, considered even less promising as a source of recruits than the Northeast is today in the US.

There is another aspect of the contemporary war machine that should be recognized, however: mercenaries, or contract soldiers. By some counts, mercenaries are the second largest force in the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, amounting to around 25,000 security guards, although no one seems to know the total number for sure. Articles about various incidents involving security services in the Iraq war theater, like Zapata International, Erinys, Sandline, Blackwater and others point out that foreign nationals--White South Africans, Serbians and so on from previous US wars--make up a large portion of their employees, while former US career soldiers, many veterans of past wars, make up the rest. In other words, another part of the Roman experience--hiring foreigners and the less civilized to become professional soldiers--is a practice that is now taking off in US military operations.

In addition, our use of the "coalition of the willing" in the Afghan war and the Iraq war is in some ways comparable to Rome's use of auxilia, even to the fact that the non-American forces are under overall US command, unless they withdraw, as the Visigoths withdrew from the Roman forces right after the great battle at the Catalaunian Fields (in Gaul), where Attila's huge army was stopped, but not defeated.

One of the reasons Stilicho tried to contain Alaric in the war in the Balkans, and tried to re-establish control there, was that it was one of the few areas in both empires where the military could still recruit soldiers (a bit like our small towns in the South), but it had been allocated to the eastern, not the western empire, a decision of the previous Emperor which Stilicho unsuccessfully contested.

The Roman military had been professionalized and had depended on mercenaries for a long time, but by the fifth century most of the armies fighting Rome's wars were mercenaries, not professional Roman soldiers, but a congeries of all the barbarian warrior tribes that lived on the peripheries of the Empire (from North Africans and Arabs to Vandals and Franks).

The limitanei, (troops of the limes, or frontiers), were troops stationed in place for generations, and were the more direct descendants of the Roman legions. Over time they became more and more absorbed by the local populations (since they were allowed to marry local women, raise families, and their children were then recruited in turn). So they became less and less Roman, but they also became less and less effective in fighting war.

In fact, by 409, border troops were simply disappearing, so much so that the Emperors Honorius and Theodosius declared that slaves (ordinarily prohibited from service) could join the border forces and win a bounty and emancipation. The decree did not change much. What was happening was that barbarian invaders and bandits spawned so much war and chaos that many people lost their livelihoods and began to join the roving bands, further contributing to the breakdown of order. Many soldiers joined them as well.

The elite troops were the mobile field army, controlled by generals like Aetius or Stilicho; they were called the comitatenses (sacred retinue, because they had accompanied the Emperor on his military campaigns). Of these, the palatini, were the most crucial; they took the place of (and are often called) the Praetorian Guard, because they were stationed near the capital: in the case of the western Empire, that meant they were stationed in central Italy, where they could control Rome or Ravenna.

One small detail which highlights how Germans had taken over the army: German bands, when they elected their chiefs raised them to stand on their shields. The palatini, often naming the Emperor in the fourth century, and in the latter part of the fifth, raised him on their shields when they did so.

The field armies were the source of military power in the fourth and fifth centuries, and they could be sent anywhere within the empire (the western army confined to the west, with the exception of Stilicho's incursions into the Balkans, the eastern armies confined to the east). Most of the time they were campaigning against barbarian inroads, or rebellions like the Gildonic war in North Africa. Periodically they were sent against bandit forces as well, such as the Baccaudae, which amounted to a long-lasting bandit state within southern Gaul. They did not succeed in eliminating the bandits, apparently, since there were recurring campaigns, and recurring edicts against shepherds and other herdsmen (prohibiting them from riding horses), because they had a tendency to join the bandits.

While the eastern Roman armies were under the control of five magistri militem, two of whom were in praesenti, meaning that both were in Constantinople (in the presence of the Emperor), thus splitting control of the all-important palatini, in the west there was one magister militem in praesenti, who controlled both foot and horse and ultimately both the border troops and the field army; this is why the western magistri, Stilicho, Aetius and Ricimer (each dominating their period) were so much more powerful than the military leaders in the east.

The food supply of the Roman armies was based on the main tax, the annona, which involved the collection of grain, meat, oil and wine. As I pointed out earlier, Senatorial estates largely exempted themselves, and the curiales, the gentry of the towns and cities, were responsible for collecting these in-kind taxes, which often drove them into bankruptcy. Sometimes high officials of the Senatorial class actually collected the annona and pocketed it, or rather, the proceeds--at least, Emperor Majorian complained that they did, thereby making re-supply of the military that much more difficult, and that much more burdensome in those areas and among those people who could not evade payment.

As for providing other supplies, it is likely that Senators had an important role, although we have no direct information on this. According to Bury , Justinian (eastern Roman Emperor in the sixth century) established arms factory monopolies, apparently to keep arms out of the hands of civilians, but that would argue that in the fifth century, and especially in the western part of the empire, arms factories were not controlled by the imperial government. We do know that most of the centers of arms manufacture had migrated toward the peripheries of the Empire, along the Rhine and the Danube in the west. It is highly likely that since Senators had such a lock on wealth in the western empire, and on the high positions, such as praetorian prefect and vicarii, that they either controlled the arms factories within their regions, or ran them directly. In any case, it is likely that they found many ways to profit from them.

However, arms and military operations were probably not the huge source of wealth they are today, although there was probably significant trade in contraband arms across the borders with barbarians. On the other hand, the wealthy did gain from military operations, unless troop movements involved destruction of their own properties. What were the favors that someone like Sidonius would have been angling to gain from a Visigothic King like Theodoric, after all, when he was losing at cards? He was probably selling him things, or lending him money, at high interest. Much of that money probably went to financing the Visigoths' military campaigns.

Much of the wealth of Senatorial families came originally from military campaigns, but many generations before. Caesar was deeply in debt, for example, until he conquered Gaul. He came back to Rome as one of its richest men. Romans at the height of Empire routinely went abroad for foreign conquests, or as governors of occupied provinces, so that they could come back wealthy. What was different in the fifth century, however, was that military activity itself was not a major source of Senatorial wealth, at least as far as we know. Bury and Fine, historians of the period, state over and over that Senators were wealthy no matter what they did. The reason was that there had been a tremendous accumulation of wealth from conquest over many generations. Fine also makes clear: the Senatorial class used its considerable power to corner whatever wealth was being generated anywhere in the western Empire.

In the US today, the accumulation of wealth from military activity is ongoing.In addition to the military mercenaries (the contracting corporations are generating instant fortunes for their founders, managers and stockholders), there are the contracts for services and construction, the most famous beneficiary of which is Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, a privately owned company. When I served in the army, soldiers did KP routinely. Now, they do not: contracted labor does that work for them, and while the workers are paid well most of the time, at least according to their accustomed national wage levels (in the Philippines or India, for example), the contracting firms make tremendous profits. One of the reasons is that they hold "cost-plus" contracts with the US Defense Department, and their sub-contractors are routinely encouraged to overcharge, since that will increase the base upon which their percentage fee is calculated. As I've mentioned in other chapters, the amount of money simply unaccounted for in the Iraq war runs into the billions of dollars. Some of that probably went to companies like Halliburton, some to their clients, some to politicians in Iraq and Afghanistan--and some, if we are to judge by the beginning spate of criminal cases, went into the pockets of individual American contractors and officers.

But military business today goes far beyond the services contracting of companies like KBR, or the security contracting by companies like Blackwater. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, General Electric is one of the largest defense contractors, but it is not the largest. That distinction goes to Lockheed-Martin. It has $20.7 billion of defense contracts, to supply missiles, a variety of aircraft from spy planes to fighters to stealth attack planes and it also has contracts to design nuclear weapons. It has spent nearly ten million dollars a year to lobby Congress, one of the means through which it "purchased" its largest contract, the design and supply of the "next generation" fighter plane to be used by all the services. It has also spent between two and three million dollars in election campaign contributions in each of the last national elections, two-thirds of the money going to Republicans. Lockheed's VP, Bruce Jackson, also chaired the Coalition for the Liberation of Iraq, a group formed to build support for the war. Jackson was responsible for gaining the support of the Iraq war from Eastern European countries, and even helped them write their letters of endorsement for the war. By doing this he facilitated sales of $3.5 billion of weapons to these countries, sales financed by US government loans. Lockheed has also gotten into the interrogation business, by buying Sytex, and hiring private interrogators for notorious places like Abu Ghraib.

To gain an idea of why billions can be made in defense contracting, you only have to look at an investigation of pricing for Lockheed spare parts for C-5 planes done by the senior industrial engineer for the Defense Management Contract Agency. He found $2,522 charged for a 4.5 inch metal sleeve, $744 for a washer, $714 for a rivet, and $5,217 for a one-inch metal bracket. Five years later, after a determination by DOD's Criminal Division that the data on which the prices were based was false or fraudulent, the Pentagon and Lockheed have still not hit upon mutually agreed upon prices, but do agree that DOD still owes Lockheed money on the contract.

You can understand why the leadership of defense companies would lobby for war. The values of their companies have risen precipitately because of the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Since 9/11, the pay for CEO's of the top three dozen publicly traded defense companies have more than doubled, and in some cases risen as much as 200%. There are laws on the books that attempt to limit CEO compensation for defense contractors, but they are honored in the breach. The highest pay was supposed to be $432,851 for 2004, but that is only the pay limited to actual contracts. George David of United Technologies earned $88 million in 2004 (about 4 times more than in 2001). This pay was despite the fact that the Pentagon canceled the contract with UT to build the Comanche helicopter; DOD had invested $6.9 billion in the project, but decided that it wasn't worth the cost after per unit cost had quadrupled. David Brooks of DHB Industries (bulletproof vests) earned $70 million, up from $525,000 in 2001, but the vests weren't that good: 5,277 of them had been returned after questions were raised that they wouldn't stop a 9mm pistol round. Halliburton CEO, David Lesar, was paid $11.4 million in 2004, up from $4.2 million in 2003, although Halliburton's subsidiary, KBR was being investigated for over-charging and even for charging for meals not delivered. Northrup Grumman's CEO, Ronald Sugar, earned $6.7 million despite his company bungling the training of the Iraqi National Army: "We've had almost one year of no progress," said Major General Paul Eaton, commenting on Northrup's training contract. The US Army denied the corporation's option to expand the contract and took over more of the training itself.

By contrast: A private, under fire in Iraq earns $37, 249.80. A one-star General earns $103,706.68. A private contractor for a company like Sytech or CACI earns $120,000 to $300,000.

Accumulation. Instead of bringing home slaves and plunder, and staging a triumph through the streets of Rome, our current war profiteers remain at their corporate headquarters and skim off the money from a distance. The effect, however, is the same: a few people make tremendous amounts of money; they are the new "Senators" in the making. Both the Bush family and Vice President Cheney are among them, Cheney having profited tremendously from his stint as Halliburton CEO. The Bush family has been in the business of the defense-security-industrial complex since World War I, long before its members went into politics. George H.W. Bush (the first Bush President) first worked for Dresser Industries which later became Halliburton. One reason, you could speculate, why George W. Bush favors the repeal of the estate tax (aside from ideological reasons), is that his father is a major partner in a private company, The Carlyle Group, that has actively invested in military industries, security contractors and oil drilling in the Persian Gulf. It has been estimated that G.H.W Bush's share may be worth as much as a billion dollars, although it is probably less. George W. Bush has had various connections with the firm, as well, such as serving on the board of one of the companies Carlyle first acquired. It should be pointed out that it is not only "Wall Street Republicans" who have profited from firms such as Carlyle. The reputedly liberal George Soros is also one of its investors.

One of the quintessential insiders, however, is Frank Carlucci, who is chairman emeritus of Carlyle, but also has substantial interests in General Dynamics, Westinghouse and Ashland Oil among other large corporations, was director of Wackenhut, an international security company, and was on the board of the Rand Corporation, a defense research company. He also belonged to the neo-conservative think-tank, Project for a New American Century, which promoted the idea of the war in Iraq long before 9/11/2001. He was Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, and was college room-mates at Princeton with the previous Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and former and later Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The point of this very small list (compared to the number of actual participants and companies), is to show how business and the business of war is intertwined with politics, and it is people like Cheney and Carlucci, Rumsfeld and the Bush's who profit enormously from it. The Carlyle Group has invested $7.4 billion in "Aerospace and Defense" industries.

And the rest? Like the Roman legionnaire during Rome's expansion, our privates and sergeants and contractors make more than they could make at home: many come from areas of high unemployment; most lack the skills to earn comparable salaries outside of the war-zone.

What was the overall economic effect of the Roman Empire on the people who stayed home? It was not that good. In fact, although Rome, as the center of Empire became the wealthiest city in the world, its people, as I've pointed out in previous chapters, became superfluous. In other words, while tremendous wealth was carried off from the conquered, and much of it came back to Rome, or to Italy, the distribution of that wealth was highly unequal. Why? Because, just like the defense corporation CEO's of today, the generals and governors and those politically well-placed were able to corner most of the plunder for their own enrichment. How else could Julius Caesar, for example, go off to Gaul with tremendous debts and come back to Rome as one of its richest men? The riches didn't come from a salary. It is probable that many of the men closest to him also gained great wealth, but how?

Armies in those days carried off anything of value that they could load in a wagon, except for the captives, who were transported on their own two feet. After a major military campaign the price for slaves went down, but still, captives were the most highly valued of all commodities plundered. Different commanders had different rules as to the distribution of plunder, but almost all of them kept the largest portion for themselves. Among barbarians, Attila was known to demand that all prominent captives would be his alone: he released them for tremendous ransoms. The advantage of prominent captives was that you could seize treasures that your army couldn't physically carry off. For example, for Attila, Roman Senators as captives would yield treasures based on the values of their estates in North Africa, Spain, Egypt and Greece, although he did not conquer any of those places. It is likely that Roman commanders operated in similar fashion. Soldiers profited at least a little, were able to carry off some things for their own profit, but when they got home they often found that the value of the work of their yeomen families was being destroyed by huge new latifundia, whose labor was based on the slaves brought back by conquest. The independent farmer couldn't compete, so many of them abandoned their marginal farms and swelled the numbers of the plebs in the cities. Sometimes they found work, but the reason for the dole--in Rome and in other cities of the Empire--was that they had become superfluous, and yet they could cause trouble, as criminal gangs and as rioting masses. What the dole demonstrated, over and over again was that the urban mob could also be used by politicians like Caesar to gain power.

In a more complicated way, the effect of empire today may be similar: it reinforces inequality of wealth and power, from defense industry profits, but also since other global corporations gain a tremendous advantage over domestic labor; they can simply relocate anywhere in the world--at least as long as Pax Americana insures their safety.

Empire does tend to have this effect. Those in political and military control profit enormously. Those back home, who are not in the elite, not only do not profit, but tend to suffer from the effects of the conquered treasure. In the case of Rome, it is probable that the reason the western Empire had such incredible inequality of wealth was its history as the seat of Empire. The eastern Empire, after all, had been the conquered part. Ironic, isn't it that it was the part of the empire that lasted so much longer?

Other empires seem to have had similar problems. In the case of Spain, the benefits of empire were actually exported to the Lowlands, which became Spain's manufacturing centers, while the Spanish suffered tremendous inflation and a loss of local industry. In the case of Britain, of course, the capital brought home did finally finance the industrial revolution, after first causing huge displacement and misery among the English in their rural villages, but of all the nations of Western Europe, Britain retained a class-bound society the longest, perhaps as a consequence of its empire.

Now, with the US aspiring to control the known world, income inequality is growing rapidly, and social mobility is falling. This is no coincidence; it is borne of the effects of empire. It is not only the direct effects of corruption and exploitative profits from the defense and security industries, but also the more indirect effects of promoting global control of capital, enabling it to marginalize local workers almost as dramatically as the huge slave latifundia marginalized the yeoman farmers of Italy and Gaul in the Roman Empire.

It is no coincidence, either, that it is a selfish class which increasingly controls the political landscape to insure and magnify the increases in inequality, as well as the aggressiveness of empire.

Are there solutions?

Political opposition to empire and to corporate dominance are obvious directions, but even countries like Sweden and Canada have large corporations, and defense industries. What they do not have is a political system dominated by either and neither have empires. The American people ultimately will be better off if the US grows out of the idea that it can control the world for its own profit.

What could we do with most of the nearly half trillion dollars the US government now spends on defense? If we had a defense sector simply adequate for our own defense and for contributing to UN-sponsored peace-keeping and peace-making, money could be freed for social welfare programs that would benefit everyone, like universal health care (which would also make our industries more competitive in the world) and universal pre-school programs and educational systems that could be the envy of the world.

Without such a defense-heavy society, we would also be considerably freer; there would be much less need (or argument in favor of) the big-brother surveillance of the NSA that the Bush administration claims is necessary, nor the nexus between CIA and FBI and the threat of being spirited away as an "enemy combatant," or "renditioned" to a foreign country for cooperative torture.

Wait a minute! What about the terrorists, the ones who have targeted the US? What about the countries that label us "the Great Satan?"

If the US were not trying to control everyone else, if specifically, we had not based our soldiers in Saudi Arabia and then in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention the more than 100 other countries in which they are now based), we would not be the focus for attacks; the terrorist groups would have less ready soil for recruitment. After all, the war in Iraq has not caused a diminution of terrorism; it has made its increase and expansion possible. Al Qaeda was not in Iraq before Saddam's overthrow; now it is a highly effective part of the insurgency. It gains support, according to a wide variety of sources, from the presence of the American occupation; it gained its expanding foothold in Iraq because of the chaos the US caused there. And its opportunity to train a whole new generation of terror agents has been provided by our presence there; they are learning how to combat modern armies.

In addition, the whole terror system is a product of rapid but unequal and undemocratic social change that has been forced upon people all over the world, and is a result of the exploitative system of corporate-dominated trade we call globalization. It's not as if countries and people don't want to "modernize" and trade, but if the benefits of modernization are only realized by the few, yet visible to the many, then some of those on the margins of the system can be easily recruited for terror.

If, on the other hand, the power of transnational corporations is curbed, if benefits and profits from trade were more equitably distributed around the world, and global corporations have to tread more carefully and respectfully, local cultures can adapt to global market changes in their own ways, rather than throwing people into the neo-capitalist world market which profits only the few. The ideas of leaders like Chavez in Venezuela, and of Evo in Bolivia are in reaction to the dictates of the IMF and the WTO, which have eviscerated government-provided services around the world. These global institutions (and the World Bank) have demanded "open markets" that permit global corporations to buy up public water systems, for example, making clean water a high-priced commodity that becomes inaccessible to the poor in the South African ghettoes. Obviously, people are not happy about such situations.

The privatization laws put into place by Paul Bremer, when he presided over the American occupation government of Iraq, are an extreme case which underlines the point: private exploitation of Iraq's oil will profit foreign (largely American) corporations; privatization of state industries will place most of them under foreign corporate control. Some Iraqis will benefit, certainly, and the industries might even become more efficient, but the country as a whole will not benefit much if profits are expatriated and if only a very small elite work force is employed. The corporations, on the other hand, expect huge profits, and the central tenet of the Bremerist "reform" was to ensure that they could be taken out of the country.

Chavista and "Evoist" ideas might promote modernization in their countries according to the values of their people, while the profits generated by exporting nationalized natural resources could create broader-based modern societies, not societies where a small wealthy elite collaborates with global companies for its own interests. And these are only early primitive examples of alternatives to the "Washington Consensus" system of global trade,

The world market facilitated by the IMF and the World Bank and the trading system put into place by the World Trading Organization (WTO) has been a radically subversive force; it has extended the power of the selfish class around the world, but it has also undermined traditional societies everywhere. Eat MacDonalds hamburgers, not chappaties and rice, or eat KFC instead of arepas or tortillas, or mutton and cous cous. Watch Gunsmoke, or Hollywood films. The use of American pop music in American torture sites in Iraq and Afghanistan (amplified so loud it deafens and disorients the inmates) may backfire yet, since it creates an extremely negative association with all western music, but it is an expression of this same cultural aggression that it is destabilizing the whole world. The US is the primary target for the terrorists who have been created by this instability, because it is seen (correctly, I think) as the source of the ideas, and as the primary power enforcing the system.

If the US were seen instead as a nation attempting to rein in the global corporations, even if only on our own soil, and of not being their advocates, their shields and their military advance guard all over the world, everyone, except the selfish class, would benefit, and soon we would no longer be the focus of the hatred of the dispossessed; we might even become their heroes.

To put it very succinctly: the US war system generates immense profits, not only for the defense industry sector, but for all global corporate interests. Still, only a very few benefit. The world is laid open to corporate exploitation, oppressing people abroad and also putting people out of work or on the defensive back home; the world system renders the majority more and more powerless. Terrorism is the weapon of the powerless.

Everyone wants modernization in some form, but the world doesn't have to go in this direction in order to achieve it.