US wages wars for its corporations, such as Halliburton: American activist

An American antiwar activist in Chicago says corporations, such as Halliburton Company, are running the United States and the country is waging devastating wars to secure these companies' global interests.

Joe Iosbaker, a leader of the United National Antiwar Coalition, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Monday.

He was commenting on a new report which says that more than 1.3 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the “war on terror” in over a decade, and the majority of these deaths were innocent civilians.

The ongoing US-led war "has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan," according to a study by a group of international physicians' organizations.

"The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware," the study's authors write adding that "this is only a conservative estimate” and the total number of causalities “could also be in excess of 2 million."

Iosbaker said, “The politicians and the media in the West are both owned by corporations.”

“When the Bush regime was in office, this was more widely known that Halliburton, for example, was making hundreds of billions [from] the US [being] in Iraq,” he said, referring to the American multinational corporation, which is one of the world's largest oil field services companies.

“All of these actions are determined by corporations and banks, that’s who our politicians and media work for – politicians work for them, the media is owned by them,” he added.

Iosbaker said the Obama administration has stopped using the term “war on terror” because it became officially unpopular, but the administration has expanded the theater of war to Syria, Libya, Palestine, Yemen, and the Philippines. “And in all of those wars, the objectives are the same: The US and the West are trying to put the United States and their corporate interests back in a profitable position in the world.”

The report, released by the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, along with Physicians for Social Responsibility and Physicians for Global on March 25, is titled "Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror.'"

Approximately one million people were killed in Iraq during the course of the US-led invasion and occupation of the country from 2003 until 2011, the report said.

Americans assume that only 9,900 Iraqis on average were killed during the US occupation of Iraq, the report shows, adding the US citizens would be far more outraged if they “were made aware that the actual number is likely to be more than a hundred times higher.”

The study only examined deaths in the three countries of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but did not include deaths in other countries attacked by American and its allied military forces, including Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria.

Iosbaker said, “I just want to close by saying that what really distinguishes the war on terror versus the broader war against Muslims and the countries with larger Muslim populations [is] basically that the Bush regime’s wars were characterized by: 1. massive invasions and occupations; and 2. unilateralism."

“The US acting without NATO and other junior partners" was responsible for "the disaster that Iraq and Afghanistan became,” he said, “because the US tried to change strategy and tactics, and the neo-strategic focus of Obama’s administration, is the Pivot for Asia, preparing to counter China, and then for the wars in the Middle East.”

“They used these special operations, the drone wars, the color revolutions, and they avoided the massive invasions because they can’t afford them,” the peace activist noted. “The last element they formulated, the way Pentagon talks about it, is that they will bring to any national people that resists them ‘unacceptable levels of destruction’, that’s the actual language that the Pentagon has and the White House has, and that’s what we are seeing, for example, in Syria right now.”

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