Richard Cummings has an article in Playboy entitled Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The piece examines the rotating door between Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon, the White House, K Street, and Congressional staff. It also looks at the results: bigger military budgets, huge profits for Lockheed, and permawar. It’s a good read, despite being horribly edited (Playboy, are you hiring?). There is one part of the article that is particularly illustrative of just how bad things are. It involves a meeting between (then) Deputy National Security advisor Stephen Hadley and a relatively little-known neo-conservative (and Lockheed executive) named Bruce P. Jackson. (You can see Jackson’s PNAC biography here).

In November of 2002, Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security advisor, asked Bruce Jackson to meet with him in the White House. They met in Hadley’s office on the ground floor of the West Wing, not far from the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Hadley had an exterior office with windows, an overt indicator of his importance within the West Wing hierarchy.

…according to Jackson, Hadley told him that “they were going to war and were struggling with a rationale” to justify it. Jackson, recalling the meeting, reports that Hadley said they were “still working out” a cause, too, but asked that he, Jackson, “set up something like the Committee on NATO” to come up with a rationale.

The Committee on NATO was dedicated to expanding NATO eastward into the former USSR, and then to selling them Lockheed Martin military equipment.

Here’s what Jackson came up with.

What Bruce Jackson came up with for Hadley this time, in 2002, was the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. The mission statement of the committee says it was “formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations.”

Sound familiar?

The pressure group began pushing for regime change — that is, military action to remove Hussein — in the usual Washington ways, lobbying members of congress, working the media and throwing money around. The committee’s pitch, or rationale as Hadley would call it, was that Saddam was a monster — routinely violating human rights — and a general menace in the Middle East.

“I didn’t see the point about WMDs or an Al Queda connection,” Jackson says. In his mind the human rights issue was sufficient to justify a war.

Jackson obviously skipped law school. Or maybe he just didn’t pay attention, because it would be illegal under international law to invade Iraq over human rights abuses without UN Security Council approval (which would have been impossible). Don’t believe me? This is from the Downing Street Minutes:

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

I want to make two brief points about this revelation. First, these same characters are trying to gin up a war with Iran right now. Believe nothing, and I mean nothing, that they say. Second:

For the war companies, things have worked out perfectly. Whatever the rationale for the invasion of Iraq, business is booming. Not long after Bush took office, Lockheed Martin’s revenues soared by more than 30 percent, as it was awarded $17 billion in contracts from the Department of Defense, a far cry from the lean years of the Clinton administration. (Under Clinton, it did win $2 billion in contracts with the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons activity; recently Bush called for 125 new nukes a year, opening up new contract horizons in that area, as well.) Its stock went from 16.375 in October of 1999 to 71.52 in June of 2002. As professor of finance at the State University at Buffalo Michael Rozeff observes, “the stock market anticipates many events.”

Lockheed Martin reported 2002 sales of $26.6 billion, a backlog of more than $70 billion and free cash of $1.7 billion. And that was before the war in Iraq.

Which Presidential candidate is going to campaign on doing something about this cycle of death and war profiteering?