Meet Joe Biden's War Cabinet
The President-Elect has selected war-mongers and profiteers to head up our foreign policy
Fans of illegal invasions, war crimes, spying, and war-profiteering rejoice – has Joe Biden got the war cabinet for you! Now that we’ve got a sense of who will be in charge of the U.S. President-elect’s foreign policy, a clear pattern has emerged.
Biden’s proposed war cabinet would be led by people who have either been in favor of the most disastrous international adventures of the past two decades or have and would continue to financially profit from endless war…Or, both.
Let’s take a look at some lowlights of the incoming Biden administration war cabinet:
Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser
This pick by the supposedly progressive President-elect sat on the advisory council for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, joined by the likes of George W. Bush’s DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, former CIA director Michael Morell, and Iraq War fan Bill Kristol. Furthermore, Sullivan has repeatedly praised President Trump’s military actions in the Middle East, including saying that further devastating innocents in Afghanistan by dropping on the beleaguered nation the largest non-nuclear bomb ever deployed was “appropriate.”
Antony Blinken, Secretary of State
While a member of President Obama’s administration, Blinken advocated for the horrendous war in Libya and also tried to convince Obama to get into a similar hot war with Syria. Joe Biden campaigned for President on ending arms sales to Saudi Arabia and stopping our joint war with them on the impoverished nation of Yemen, which has killed over 100,000 people and created the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.
Biden may be surprised to learn, then, that his pick for the State Department, Blinken, previously helped accelerate weapons shipments to Saudi Arabia to massacre people in Yemen. Going back a bit further, Blinken was then Senator Biden’s top foreign policy advisor when Biden giddily marched us into war with Iraq under President George W. Bush.
Since temporarily leaving public office, Blinken has decided to directly profit from war and death, co-founding the WestExec Advisors consultancy which “helps defense corporations market their products to the Pentagon.” That means Blinken gets rich from weapons manufacturers paying him to help convince his contacts in Washington to buy them.
Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence
While in the CIA during the Obama administration, Haines had a major role in coming up with pretense for the President’s illegal drone murder program. Haines also helped Bush officials get away with destroying evidence in an attempt to cover up their torture programs. Haines also has had lots of praise for current CIA Director Gina Haspel, who personally oversaw rendition and torture.
On the war-profiteer front, Haines is connected with Palantir, a CIA-backed data-mining company which ICE used to make more efficient their kidnapping of immigrant and refugee children, aka. “family separation”, program. Haines is also on the board of the Center for a New American Security, which is funded by, among others, weapons manufacturers, oil companies, and Palantir.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Ambassador to the United Nations
While a member of the Obama administration, Thomas-Greenfield oversaw drone strikes in Somalia as well as the increasing of the United States’ colonial military presence in Niger.
General Lloyd Austin, Pentagon Chief
In our previous column on Biden’s proposed war cabinet, we discussed the significance of Biden’s attempt to follow in Donald Trump’s footsteps by violating federal law and democratic norms and appointing a recent military serviceperson as so-called “Secretary of Defense.” Austin was a working general just three years ago.
For more on the importance of maintaining civilian control over armed forces in a democracy, please read that column.
In the three years since Austin retired from the military, however, the general decided to cash-in by working for weapons manufacturer Raytheon. As of October, Austin reportedly owned $500,000 in Raytheon shares. Now, he intends to move from the board of Raytheon into direct control of how many of their weapons will be purchased, and used, as head of the Pentagon.
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Biden’s picks for his war cabinet have facilitated or otherwise approved of torture, drone murders, rendition, the War in Iraq, the War in Libya, and have made fortunes from companies and think tanks that have an interest in those wars continuing indefinitely. In our last piece we discussed the dangers of the military controlling a country.
This one is about the dangers of agency heads having clear conflicts of interest. Austin is still on the Raytheon board of directors.
Others mentioned above work or have recently worked for the interests of other weapons manufacturers. Because of that, such Biden cabinet picks have vested, literal and financial interests in making sure that there is a captured market demand for weapons.
Assuring demand for weapons is done by making sure that weapons get used, and that is done by waging war. If Biden has his way, the people in control of if, when, and where we go to war will stand to profit financially from sending us to war.
We already have the longest war in American history raging on in Afghanistan. The War in Iraq is not far behind, or it has surpassed Afghanistan if you count both Gulf hot wars, tied together by the un-ending sanctions we’ve placed on the country which themselves have killed half a million Iraqi people in addition to the over million we’ve murdered through direct military action.
War powers are already effectively out of the hands of Congress as well, and do not appear to be going back since the federal legislature decided to hand over that right and responsibility to George W. Bush two decades ago. We already have enough firepower to single-handedly destroy the world several times over.
Our true military budget is unknown, not audited, and even our official military budget is greater than that of China, India, Russia, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, and South Korea, combined, by billions of dollars. The current administration proudly dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb, ever, and was praised for it by Republicans and Democrats alike, including one of Biden’s above picks.
The U.S. empire is currently killing more people than ever before, in order to profit companies that pay big money to the people now in charge of our empire. Joe Biden says we should continue doing this.
This structure of legalized bribery made possible by a revolving door of sorts between the public and private sectors means that a bloody profit motive is what helps officials make decisions of life and death for millions of people all across the globe. We as citizens also have increasingly less control over this imperial death machine;
As more and more innocent people all across the world are killed in our names, both Republican and Democrat officials are the richer for it. The more pain and suffering and death we rain down on the rest of the world, the more the companies that have captured our government profit.