Lifted from zmag.org:

War is extremely useful to elites, not only for carving out opportunities for business abroad, but for its internal effects. As Thorstein Veblen explained 99 years ago, war provides "the largest and most promising factor of cultural discipline....It makes for a conservative animus on the part of the populace. During war time, and within the military organization at all times...civil rights are in abeyance; and the more warfare and armament the more abeyance."
And, crucially, war "directs the popular interest to other, nobler, institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal distribution of wealth or of creature comforts." (The Theory of Business Enterprise [1904], pp. 391-3).

Rightwing business administrations gravitate quickly to war and fear- mongering to help cover over their service to their principals (i.e., making income distribution more unequal): Immediately upon taking office in the early 1980s Reagan mounted a war on terror and on the "evil empire," and his clone George W. Bush has done the same two decades later. They have both pressed for soaring arms budgets to meet inflated or manufactured threats, and both have been given aid and comfort by the Free Press.