War

This is a fantastic essay describing how America's war on terror, like the war on drugs, is a self-generating war. In other words, it creates more enemies than it kills which leads to never-ending profits for the military-intelligence complex.

"The two self-generating wars have in effect become one. By launching a War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico, America has contributed to a parastate of organized terror in Colombia (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) and an even bloodier reign of terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in the last six years).¹ By launching a War on Terror in Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed to a doubling of opium production there, making Afghanistan now the source of 90 percent of the world's heroin and most of the world's hashish.²
Americans should be aware of the overall pattern that drug production repeatedly rises where America intervenes militarily – Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia and Afghanistan since then. (Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.)³ And the opposite is also true: where America ceases to intervene militarily, notably in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug production declines.⁴
Both of America's self-generating wars are lucrative to the private interests that lobby for their continuance.⁵ At the same time, both of these self-generating wars contribute to increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world."

And the US is far and away the largest exporter of weapons.

"[From 2010 to 2011] America's total dominance of overseas arms sales had more than doubled, to represent 79 percent of global arms sales.

And what is NATO's primary activity today requiring arms? Not defense against Russia, but support for America in its self-generating War on Terror, in Afghanistan as once in Iraq. The War on Terror should be seen for what it really is: a pretext for maintaining a dangerously oversized U.S. military, in an increasingly unstable exercise of unjust power.

In other words America is by far the chief country flooding the world with armaments today."

This guy isn't afraid to tell it like it is.

"Of the $66.3 billion in U.S. overseas arms sales in 2011, over half, or $33.4 billion, consisted of sales to Saudi Arabia. This included dozens of Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, weapons described by the New York Times, as needed for defense against Iran, but more suitable for Saudi Arabia's increasing involvement in aggressive asymmetric wars (e.g. in Syria).²³
These Saudi arms sales are not incidental; they reflect an agreement between the two countries to offset the flow of US dollars to pay for Saudi oil. During the oil price hikes of 1971 and 1973 Nixon and Kissinger negotiated a deal with both Saudi Arabia and Iran to pay significantly higher prices for crude, on the understanding that the two countries would then recycle the petrodollars by various means, prominently arms deals.²⁴
The wealth of the two nations, America and Saudi Arabia, has become ever more interdependent. This is ironic. In the words of a leaked US cable, "Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda."²⁵ The Rabita or Muslim World League, launched and largely funded by the Saudi royal family, has provided an international meeting place for international Salafists including some al Qaeda leaders.²⁶
In short, the wealth generated by the Saudi-American relationship is funding both the al Qaeda-type jihadists of the world today and America's self-generating war against them. The result is an incremental militarization of the world abroad and America at home, as new warfronts in the so-called War on Terror emerge, predictably, in previously peaceful areas like Mali."

I've often talked about how we fund both sides in the war on drugs and the war in Afghanistan, but this guy is making a broader connection that makes perfect sense.