War Is a
Racket.

The Witness

The General Who Told the Truth

Smedley Darlington Butler spent more than three decades in the Marine Corps fighting America's wars. Then he spent the rest of his life telling Americans who those wars were really for.

VerifiedMedal of Honor · Veracruz, Mexico, 1914 · Medal of Honor · Fort Rivière, Haiti, 1915
Butler was one of only two Marines ever to receive two Medals of Honor for separate acts of heroism. [3] Nobody can call him a coward or a peacenik who never served.

VerifiedAfter retiring in October 1931, he toured the country giving a speech called "War Is a Racket." It drew such a response that he expanded it into a short book, published in 1935. [1]

"War is a racket. It always has been."Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket, 1935 [2]

He named the customers

VerifiedIn the November 1935 issue of the magazine Common Sense, Butler described his own career as muscle for Wall Street and the banks. [5] He listed the jobs one by one:

• Nicaragua, 1909–12, for the international banking house of Brown Brothers.
• Haiti and Cuba, made safe for the National City Bank to collect revenues.
• Honduras, 1903, made "right" for American fruit companies.
• The Dominican Republic, 1916, for American sugar interests.
• Mexico, 1914, especially Tampico, for American oil interests. [4]

"In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."Butler, Common Sense, Vol. 4, No. 11, November 1935 [5]

AttributedThe places he occupied remember him differently. Journalist Jonathan M. Katz, who retraced Butler's path, reports that in Haiti he was known simply as "The Devil." [11]

He stopped a coup and nobody went to jail

VerifiedIn November 1934 Butler testified under oath before the House committee known as the McCormack–Dickstein Committee. He said wealthy businessmen had tried to recruit him to lead a fascist movement against President Franklin Roosevelt. The men he named all denied it. [6] Newspapers began mocking his account almost immediately. [8]

VerifiedThe committee's February 1935 report said it had obtained evidence that certain persons had attempted to establish a fascist organization in the country. [7] No one was ever prosecuted. [6]

His fix: take the profit out

VerifiedButler's book ends with a plan to "smash" the racket. The first step was to make war unprofitable. [1] He proposed conscripting capital and industry, and holding their pay to a soldier's wage, before a single young man was drafted. He wanted any declaration of war put to a vote of the people who would actually have to fight, and he wanted the military limited to defending American soil. [2]

Congress looked, then looked away

VerifiedButler was not alone. From 1934 to 1936 the Senate's Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, led by Sen. Gerald Nye (R-N.D.), investigated the "merchants of death" who profited from World War I. It found the arms industry had engaged in price-fixing and held excessive influence over foreign policy before and during that war. [10]

VerifiedThe investigation ended abruptly. The Senate cut off its funding after Nye attacked the late President Woodrow Wilson for withholding information from Congress before it declared war. The hearings did produce three neutrality acts. [9]

Count One · 1898

Remember the Maine

The pattern is older than any living American. The first modern American war began with an explosion, a headline, and a villain picked before anyone looked.

VerifiedThe battleship USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor in February 1898. American newspapers blamed Spain, and "Remember the Maine!" became the battle cry of the Spanish-American War. [12]

VerifiedSpain's own inquiry at the time concluded that a spontaneous fire in a coal bunker next to a magazine caused the blast. Two U.S. Navy boards disagreed. [12]

DisputedIn 1976, Adm. Hyman Rickover's study found no technical evidence that an outside explosion started the destruction. It concluded the most likely cause was heat from a coal-bunker fire next to a magazine, while noting this could not be proven. [13] A 1998 National Geographic study reopened the question and could not rule out a mine. [13]

Either way, the country went to war on a blame nobody had established. Smedley Butler was 16 when it started. He joined the Marines for it.

Count Two · The Colony

Rubber, Blood and Michelin

VerifiedFrance ruled Vietnam as part of French Indochina from the late 1800s. Rubber plantations in the south fed the booming French auto and tire industry. The largest Michelin plantation was Phu Rieng. [15]

VerifiedIn 1927, Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work at Phu Rieng. His memoir, The Red Earth, is a firsthand account of what happened there. [14] Official colonial records showed 17 percent of Phu Rieng workers died in 1927 alone. That figure may be low, because the plantation's own supervisors had reason to hide losses. [15]

VerifiedOn February 3, 1930, more than 5,000 workers rose up, held the plantation for four days, and forced the French supervisor to agree to better conditions before the revolt was crushed. Binh was sent to the prison island of Con Dao. [15]

VerifiedThe plantation also gave birth to the opposition. The first Communist Party cell in southeastern Vietnam was founded at Phu Rieng in October 1929. [16] The colony built its own enemy.

Count Three · 1945–1950

The Ally They Dropped

The first Americans to fight in Vietnam fought on Ho Chi Minh's side.

VerifiedIn July 1945, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, sent an eight-man team under Maj. Allison K. Thomas into northern Indochina to work with Ho's Viet Minh against the Japanese. [18][17] The team's medic, Paul Hoagland, treated a seriously ill Ho. Thomas later said he had no idea at the time that Ho was a Communist. [19]

VerifiedOn September 2, 1945, Ho declared Vietnam's independence. He deliberately opened with words from the American Declaration of Independence. [20]

1. January 24, 1944VerifiedPresident Franklin Roosevelt puts his opposition to continued French rule of Vietnam in writing. [21]
2. 1945–1946VerifiedHo sends letters and telegrams to President Truman asking for American support. Truman does not reply. [21] The U.S. adopts a neutral policy as France goes to war to retake Vietnam. [20]
3. May 1, 1950VerifiedTruman approves $10 million in military aid for the French war in Indochina, announced May 8. [22] An additional $5 million follows on June 27. [24]
4. Fiscal year 1954VerifiedU.S. aid reaches $1,063 million, covering 78 percent of the cost of France's war. [23]

By the end, American taxpayers were paying most of the bill for a European power to reconquer its colony. The man who had quoted Jefferson was getting his weapons from Moscow and Beijing.

Count Four · 1954–1956

The Election That Never Came

VerifiedFrance lost at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva Accords split Vietnam temporarily and called for national elections in 1956.

VerifiedPresident Eisenhower later wrote that, had elections been held during the fighting, "possibly 80 per cent of the population" would have voted for Ho over the French-backed chief of state, Bao Dai. [25][74]

VerifiedConvinced that Ho and his followers would win a free election, the Eisenhower administration installed Ngo Dinh Diem to lead South Vietnam and backed his refusal to hold the national vote. [26]

DisputedEisenhower's 80 percent figure described a vote against Bao Dai during the war, not against Diem in 1956. Historians still argue over how a 1956 vote would have gone. What is not disputed is that Washington backed blocking it.

For a country that sells itself to the world as democracy's defender, that is a hard sentence to read. The United States helped cancel an election because it expected to lose it.

Count Five · August 1964

The Attack That Never Happened

The legal basis for the Vietnam War was a resolution written months before the incident it was supposedly answering.

1. Early 1964VerifiedAdministration lawyers draft a congressional resolution authorizing force in Southeast Asia, months before any attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. [27]
2. Late July 1964VerifiedSouth Vietnamese commando raids on the North Vietnamese coast, planned under a U.S. program called OPLAN 34A, are under way. The destroyer USS Maddox is patrolling nearby collecting signals intelligence. [33]
3. August 2, 1964VerifiedNorth Vietnamese torpedo boats attack the Maddox. This first clash was real. [27]
4. August 4, 1964VerifiedThe Maddox and USS Turner Joy report a second attack on a stormy night. The NSA's own historian later concluded the evidence did not support it. [31]
5. August 6–7, 1964VerifiedAfter 40 minutes of discussion, the House passes the resolution 416 to 0. The Senate passes it 88 to 2. [27]

What they told Congress

VerifiedAccording to the Pentagon's own Vietnam War 50th Anniversary history, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lied to reporters on August 6 when he denied knowing the nature of the 34A raids. His own department ran them. Three days earlier he had told the President that some of the raids had led to the August 2 attack. [29]

VerifiedThe White House tapes show both Johnson and McNamara knew from the start that the Maddox mission was linked to the raids. [33][32]

"Hell, those damn, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish."President Lyndon Johnson, privately, after the resolution passed [28]

What the NSA found

VerifiedNSA historian Robert Hanyok reviewed 122 relevant signals-intelligence products. He found that the overwhelming portion of the evidence about August 4, nearly 90 percent, was kept out of the agency's post-attack summaries and its October 1964 final report. [30]

AttributedHanyok did not find a "smoking gun" proving a cover-up. He said the evidence suggested an active effort to make the intelligence fit the claim of an attack. [31] His study was written in 2001 and kept secret until its release in 2005.

VerifiedCongress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1970. [33] By then the war had been running on it for six years.

Count Six · 1964–1968

What They Said When They Thought No One Was Listening

The President

VerifiedOn May 27, 1964, more than two months before Tonkin, Johnson spoke with his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, on a call recorded by the White House taping system. [35]

"I don't think that it's worth fighting for."President Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, recorded May 27, 1964 [34]

In the same call he worried aloud about a sergeant on his staff with six children, and asked what in the world he would be sending such men there for. Then he sent more than half a million of them.

The Pentagon's real reasons

VerifiedIn a 1965 memo, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton weighted America's aims in Vietnam. [36]

Seventy percent of the reason was saving face. The reason given to the American public came last.

The secret history

VerifiedMcNamara ordered a secret internal history of the war, later known as the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg leaked it in 1971. The government kept the complete study, about 7,000 pages, classified until June 2011. [37]

The candidate

AttributedIn October 1968, Johnson was trying to start peace talks. On October 22, Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman took notes on a call with candidate Richard Nixon. They record an order to keep Anna Chennault "working on" South Vietnam, and under the heading of the bombing halt, this question: [38][39]

"Any other way to monkey wrench it?"Haldeman's notes of a call with Richard Nixon, October 22, 1968 [38]

DisputedNixon denied interfering for the rest of his life. His foundation argues the note referred to political maneuvering against Johnson, not diplomatic sabotage, and that no deal was within reach. [40] See For the Record.

Count Seven · Follow the Money

Who Got Paid

VerifiedA four-company consortium known as RMK-BRJ built the bases, ports and airfields for the American war. Its final contract value was $1.865 billion, not counting government-supplied materials and shipping. [41] At the time it was the largest construction project in the world. [43]

VerifiedOne of the four partners was Texas-based Brown & Root, a major backer of Lyndon Johnson's political career. [43] Biographer Robert Caro wrote that "Brown & Root became an industrial colossus thanks to Lyndon Johnson." [42]

AttributedIn 1966 a young Republican congressman, Donald Rumsfeld, condemned the Johnson administration on the House floor over the consortium. He said it was beyond him why such a huge contract was not being properly audited. [44] Brown & Root later became part of Halliburton. Its descendant, KBR, would become the top contractor of the Iraq war that Rumsfeld ran as Defense Secretary (see Count Nine).

VerifiedBetween 1962 and 1971, the Air Force sprayed about 19 million gallons of herbicide over Vietnam. About 11 million gallons were Agent Orange, made by companies including Dow Chemical and Monsanto. [46] In 1984, seven chemical companies including Dow and Monsanto agreed to pay $180 million to settle claims by exposed American veterans. [45] No Vietnamese victim has ever been compensated by those companies. [47]

The men who made the decisions

The bill

Verified58,220 U.S. service members died. [48] The U.S. troop presence peaked at 536,100 in 1968. [43]

DisputedVietnamese deaths are contested. A 1995 demographic study put total Vietnamese war deaths at roughly 1 million. [49] Vietnam's government estimated more than 3 million, including 2 million civilians. [50]

Behind every one of the 58,220 names is a family that got a telegram. Many of them were somebody's older brother.

Count Eight · 1990

The Girl Who Wasn't a Nurse

VerifiedOn October 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as "Nayirah" told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she had watched Iraqi soldiers take babies out of hospital incubators and leave them to die. [53]

VerifiedIn January 1992 it came out that she had never been a nurse. She was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. Her testimony was part of a public relations campaign that the Kuwaiti government-in-exile ran through a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, together with the American PR firm Hill & Knowlton. [51]

VerifiedPresident George H.W. Bush cited the incubator story as proof the war was necessary. Hill & Knowlton has denied wrongdoing. [52]

DisputedIraq really did invade Kuwait, and the war had other grounds. But the most emotional piece of the public case was staged. See For the Record.

Count Nine · 2002–2011

The Weapons That Weren't There

1. July 23, 2002VerifiedMinutes of a meeting in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's office record the head of British intelligence reporting back from Washington: "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." [54]
2. February 5, 2003VerifiedSecretary of State Colin Powell makes the case for war at the United Nations. On biological weapons, his main source is an informant code-named CURVEBALL. [57]
3. March 2003The invasion begins.
4. October 6, 2004VerifiedThe chief U.S. weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, reports that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction when the war began. [58]
5. June 5, 2008VerifiedA bipartisan majority of the Senate Intelligence Committee, 10 to 5, releases a report on whether officials' public statements about Iraq were backed by intelligence. [60] It finds the administration's claims that Iraq had a partnership with al-Qaeda were not supported. [59][61]

AttributedPowell later called the speech a "blot" on his record. In 2016 he said the President had already decided on military action by the time he spoke. [56]

Who got paid

VerifiedA Financial Times analysis found contractors received at least $138 billion for work tied to the Iraq war. At the top was KBR, formerly Kellogg Brown & Root, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, with at least $39.5 billion. [62]

The bill

VerifiedAbout 4,500 U.S. service members died in Iraq. Iraq Body Count had recorded more than 114,000 civilian deaths by the end of 2011. [65]

VerifiedBrown University's Costs of War Project estimates the post-9/11 wars cost the U.S. more than $8 trillion through 2021, largely borrowed. It counts more than 900,000 people killed directly and an estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths in the war zones. [63][64]

Count Ten · 2001–2021

The Afghanistan Papers

VerifiedIn December 2019, the Washington Post published more than 2,000 pages of confidential government interviews about the war in Afghanistan. [67] The documents show high-ranking officials generally believed the war was unwinnable and kept that view hidden from the public. [66]

VerifiedThe Post reported that senior officials across three administrations made optimistic statements they knew were false and hid evidence the war had become unwinnable. [67]

Johnson's tapes, McNaughton's memo, and the Afghanistan Papers tell the same story fifty years apart. In private, they knew. In public, they said the opposite. Others did the dying.

Count Eleven · The Machinery

How They Sell It

No war on this page started because the public demanded it. Each one was sold. The sales method barely changes, and it works on people of every party.

Step 1: Hand the public one vivid story

A ship explodes. Torpedo boats attack in the dark. Babies are pulled from incubators. A vial of anthrax is held up at the United Nations. Each story was simple, emotional and presented as certain. Each one was wrong, staged or unproven (Counts One, Five, Eight and Nine).

Step 2: Control who explains it on TV

VerifiedIn 2008 the New York Times revealed that the Pentagon had recruited retired military officers who appeared on television as independent analysts of the Iraq war. The Pentagon gave them talking points and private briefings, and many had business ties to defense contractors. Viewers were not told. [78] Reporter David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for the investigation. [79]

Step 3: Repeat it until it feels true

VerifiedIn a September 2003 Washington Post poll, 69 percent of Americans said it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks. [80] There was no evidence for it. That same month, President Bush himself said there was no evidence Saddam was involved. [81] Nobody had to say the false thing outright. Saying "Saddam" and "9/11" in the same breath, again and again, was enough. [86]

Step 4: Make doubt look like disloyalty

Questioning the war becomes failing to "support the troops." That is how a resolution passes the House 416 to 0 after 40 minutes (Count Five). The only two senators who voted no on Tonkin, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, turned out to be right. Both were out of the Senate after the 1968 election.

Step 5: Keep the people who decide far from the people who die

VerifiedGeorge Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War and was shot through the throat. Afterward he wrote that the war propaganda and the hatred come invariably from people who are not fighting. [76]

VerifiedOn March 18, 2003, the day before the Iraq invasion began, former First Lady Barbara Bush, mother of the President, was asked on Good Morning America about television coverage of the coming war. She said she would not watch it, and asked about the talk of body bags and deaths: [75]

"Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"Barbara Bush, ABC's Good Morning America, March 18, 2003 [75]

Nearly 4,500 Americans did not get to look away from it (Count Nine).

Step 6: Put it on the credit card

VerifiedThe post-9/11 wars were paid for largely by borrowing. Brown University's Costs of War Project calls them "credit card wars." [63] No war tax was raised, so most families never felt the bill. They pay it anyway, twice: once in the taxes that cover the spending, and again in the interest on the debt, for decades.

Step 7: Never let it end

AttributedIn 1984, Orwell imagined a state at permanent war, where the real target is the population at home. In the novel, the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory but to keep the structure of society intact. [77] It is a novel, not a report. But a 20-year war in Afghanistan that officials privately called unwinnable (Count Ten) would not have surprised him.

The Evidence of a Pattern

The Racket, Step by Step

Commentary · The Publisher's Verdict

Who Answers for It?

This section is opinion, and it is labeled that way. Crisis of Truth puts every case through three questions.

Disagree? The strongest case against this verdict is in For the Record, and you should read it.

Sources

The Record

1. Wikipedia, "War Is a Racket" (speech tour, 1935 publication, Butler's three steps). wikipedia.org
2. Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (1935), full text, Internet Archive. archive.org
3. U.S. Marine Corps History Division, "Maj Smedley Darlington Butler," Medal of Honor recipients. usmcu.edu
4. Wikipedia, "Common Sense (American magazine)" (Butler's 1935 statement). wikipedia.org · Philosophical Society, Butler excerpt. philosophicalsociety.com
5. Smedley D. Butler, "America's Armed Forces," Common Sense, Vol. 4, No. 11 (Nov. 1935), via Montclair State University. montclair.edu
6. Wikipedia, "Business Plot." wikipedia.org
7. Saturday Evening Post, "Considering History: The 1933 Business Plot to Overthrow America" (2023); New England Historical Society, committee report. saturdayeveningpost.com · newenglandhistoricalsociety.com
8. Libertarianism.org (Cato Institute), "Smedley Butler & the 'Business Plot,' Part I" (includes testimony). libertarianism.org
9. U.S. Senate, "Merchants of Death" (Nye Committee). senate.gov
10. Wikipedia, "Nye Committee." wikipedia.org
11. History News Network, review of Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism. historynewsnetwork.org
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13. U.S. Naval Institute, Naval History, "What Really Sank the Maine?" (April 1998). usni.org
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15. Wikipedia (2007 archive), "Phu Rieng Do" (citing Tran Tu Binh and colonial records). classicistranieri.com
16. Binh Phuoc Province Tourism, Phu Rieng Party cell national historical relic. binhphuoc.gov.vn
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23. Pentagon Papers, Part II, p. 43 (aid reached $1,063 million, 78% of French costs). wikisource.org
24. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Vol. VI, Doc. 533. history.state.gov
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28. Council on Foreign Relations, "Ten Worst Decisions: Gulf of Tonkin Resolution." cfr.org
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30. Robert J. Hanyok, NSA, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery," via Navy Department Library. history.navy.mil
31. National Security Archive, "Tonkin Gulf Intelligence 'Skewed'" (Dec. 1, 2005). nsarchive.gwu.edu · History News Network. hnn.us
32. National Security Archive, LBJ tapes on the Gulf of Tonkin. nsarchive.gwu.edu
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35. Not Even Past (University of Texas), on the May 27, 1964 recording (Johnson Library Tape 64.28). notevenpast.org
36. Famous Trials, Pentagon Papers excerpts (McNaughton weighting). famous-trials.com · Museo Reina Sofía, full 70/20/10 text. museoreinasofia.es
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41. Wikipedia, "RMK-BRJ" (final contract value). wikipedia.org
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43. JSTOR Daily, "The Logistics That Powered the Vietnam War." daily.jstor.org
44. CorpWatch, "US: Perpetual Wars Deliver Poor Returns for America" (Rumsfeld on RMK-BRJ). corpwatch.org
45. History.com, "Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange win $180 million settlement." history.com
46. Arizona State University, Embryo Project, "In re Agent Orange Product Liability Litigation." asu.edu
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53. Democracy Now!, interview with John R. MacArthur (2018). democracynow.org
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55. Slate, Fred Kaplan, on reading the Downing Street memo. slate.com
56. Wikipedia, "Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council." wikipedia.org
57. National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 234, CURVEBALL. nsarchive.gwu.edu
58. CNN, "Report: No WMD stockpiles in Iraq" (Oct. 6, 2004). cnn.com
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64. Brown University, "Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths" (Sept. 1, 2021). brown.edu
65. Dawn (AFP), Iraq Body Count end-of-2011 tally. dawn.com
66. Wikipedia, "Afghanistan Papers." wikipedia.org
67. Voice of America, "Washington Post: Government Study Shows US Officials Misled Public on Afghan War" (Dec. 2019). voanews.com
68. National Archives, "President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address (1961)." archives.gov
69. Cambridge University Press, chapter on Ho Chi Minh and the origins of Vietnamese communism. cambridge.org
70. Wilson Center, Brett Reilly, "The Myth of the Wilsonian Moment." wilsoncenter.org
71. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–68, Vol. XXVI, Doc. 284, Rusk to Johnson on Lee Kuan Yew. history.state.gov
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74. Texas Observer (1967), full Eisenhower quotation including "rather than chief of state Bao Dai." texasobserver.org
75. Snopes, Barbara Bush "beautiful mind" quote (Good Morning America, March 18, 2003). snopes.com
76. George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943), via libcom.org. libcom.org
77. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Part Two, Chapter 9; quotation collection. goodreads.com
78. Wikipedia, "Pentagon military analyst program" (New York Times, April 2008). wikipedia.org
79. Pulitzer Prizes, David Barstow of The New York Times. pulitzer.org
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81. CBS News, "Bush: No Saddam Links To 9/11" (Sept. 2003). cbsnews.com
82. PolitiFact, "No, Werner Herzog didn't say that about America and Germany" (2019). politifact.com
83. Snopes, "Did Werner Herzog Tweet America is 'Waking Up, As Germany Once Did'?" snopes.com
84. The Guardian via History News Network, "How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power" (2004). historynewsnetwork.org
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86. Pew Research Center, "A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq." pewresearch.org

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