Does one American in a thousand know that the Federal government is buying 23 VIP helicopters, each one of which will cost more than the extravagantly expensive F-22 fighter aircraft? A half-billion dollar helicopter—a half billion dollars each! — to ferry political hacks to their campaign events?

AFRICOM, the new Dept. of Defense initiative for that continent, represents a God-sent opportunity for both our major political parties to find new worlds to conquer. The GOP, being a subsidiary of Big Oil, is fairly licking its chops at West African oil.

One feature of Mr. Greenspan’s memoirs that has caused Beltway politicos to contract a case of the vapors is his statement that the invasion of Iraq was “€œlargely about oil.”€ In only one day, he issued one of Washington’s usual non-denial denials that trips itself up in its own contradictions. Through Bob Woodward, the imperial capital’s amanuensis of record, he now says that oil “€œwas not the administration’s motive.”€ [5] So which is it? “€“ if no less a figure than the then-chairman of the Federal Reserve board believed securing Middle East oil supplies against Saddam Hussein’s potential depredations was a legitimate and defensible motive, why was he so quick to issue an anxious dementi saying it was the furthest thing from the administration’s mind? One expects that Mr. Greenspan, now a private citizen, received a testy phone call from either President Bush or Vice President Cheney.

No regime, no matter how theoretically hostile, can afford to drink its oil. One cannot emphasize too many times the hypocrisy of the “protecting-the-flow-of-oil” cant coming from the mouths of theoretical conservatives. On the one hand, we must endure their panegyrics about the limitless blessings of the free market, where a buyer will always find a seller and vice-versa. Yet mysteriously, this mechanism will not work where oil is concerned.

Much has been written about the military industrial complex: its obscene cost overruns; the corrupt relations between the uniformed military, the contractors, and Congress; the wild threat inflation. Too little studied has been the role of ostensibly non-partisan think tanks as the semi-official propaganda arm of the complex, and as the transmission belt of propaganda themes between the government and the prestige press. While the activity of the American Enterprise Institute as a propaganda organ is widely known because of its tub-thumping for the Iraq war and its championing of Iranian spy Achmed Chalibi, the same charge applies, to a greater or lesser degree, to most of the “€œprestige”€ think tanks: Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, the Hudson Institute, etc. They are an integral part of the government’s two-track propaganda machine for selling war. For the downscale end of the market, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Michael Savage will do nicely. Their braying voices and crude arguments…