4 ms·

American wars will never stop precisely because the war has no great adverse impact on American lives. When other countries go to war, like Pakistan against In

American wars will never stop precisely because the war has no great adverse impact on American lives. When other countries go to war, like Pakistan against India for example, their citizens feel the pain. So sooner or later they realize war is not all that good and they form an uneasy peace agreement. Americans have no such compulsion towards peace, because the wars they finance always ruin some other country and kill some other people. At the same time, it sustains a good war economy and keeps the public occupied. These wars are win-win from the perspective of the American establishment. As a side note, this is why 9/11 was such a monumental event from an American point of view: it was one of the very few times that Americans were in the crosshairs. As Chomsky put it "This is stuff that we do to you, you don't do it to us."

seesomesense 11y ago
The cure for the American love of war is to have more of these wars fought on the American mainland.
- aces- 11y ago
  The citizenry would be an awful lot less rah-rah over "terrorism" and bad guys if the government was forced to actually ask the public to pay for the costs of war out of pocket. Oh, Saddam is an evildoer with WMDs? Let's get him - that'll be just $5000 per household. I wonder how many people would put their money where their mouth is. Wars have costs, and when those costs are subsidized by money printing, the bulk of society doesn't associate the immense costs of war with the war itself. Therefore wars are effectively waged cost free according to the populace since the US government has monopoly rights to print the world reserve currency. If nation-states lost the ability to mint their own money out of thin air, and instead had to continuously pester and beg the populace to pay for wars out of pocket, we would have less wars. That is the cure for war, a move away from fiat money. Nothing else can be more effective than taking away the military industrial complex's right to print money out of thin air.
- zanny 11y ago
  Thats the greatest ruse. There will never be another war on American soil. At least anything other than opportunistic strikes - suicide bombers, untraceable ICBM strikes, or attacks by non-governmental groups. You will never see Chinese, Russian, Mexican... any foreign nationalities soliders walking down the streets of New York or LA. A real war, in the modern world, without all the bullshit proxyisms and toying with lives, is resolved with nuclear arms first and foremost. Don't think for a second this country would tolerate anything less than nuclear retaliation to a ground invasion of the mainland USA by a foreign government. Hell, an organized terrorist group would see themselves nuked out of existence if they tried to do a land invasion. It is instant suicide to attack America directly. Why do you think the entire point of the Taliban during the 80s against Russia, and of all the myriad terrorist groups operating against the USA today, was to lead a band of nomads to commit suicide raids and guerrilla attacks against them? They knew they could never "win" a war. They could just make their enemy lose. They worked to help bleed the USSR dry, and are winning by all their own metrics to this day by doing the same to the USA. They hide in caves while we flush a trillion a year down the toilet in the name of security against them. And people wonder how Rome fell.
  - meira 11y ago
    This kind of thinking, the same of Fox News and the media uses, is what support this "war on terror". All of great empires thought they would never been invaded or destroyed. Until they were. It would not be that impossible to invade USA if the country's foreign policy keep turning every country in the world into an enemy. A full war against Americans (which is not impossible to happen, as the US is doing bad even to european countries) would put US in a very fragile situation.
    - zanny 11y ago
      All the great empires did not have weapons that could render the planet uninhabitable a hundred times over. Don't act like nuclear arms did not change war. No, the USA would not survive a global war versus every other power. The US has enough missile subs, secret launch bases, and distributed silos to make it impossible to do a joint strike to eliminate the entire American nuclear arsenal. But very few would survive that war - most of the planet would be an irradiated uninhabitable wasteland. I would expect you would have survivors of a global nuclear war, but it would not be a pleasant world to live in. There is no situation where you could do a ground invasion and takeover of any sufficiently nuclear armed first world country where that country would not use nukes as a final measure. That is what they are for. I mean go ahead, try taking over Pakistan and see if they don't nuke you for it, for example.
zanny 11y ago
Except it does. We hurt our performance on the world stage by predominantly throwing away something close to a trillion dollars a year, plus the millions of able bodied Americans wasting their lives killing or enabling it. Take away all the waste from the DoD - from the war on terror - hell, go back, and undo all the rampant spending and insanity that existed throughout the Cold War, without all the nuke stockpiling, all the R&D and intense investment in newer and better arms, all the money we poured into foreign states to play a game of chess on the International stage with lives, cultures, and nations. Instead, spend it on research, NASA, borrow less, tax less, give us a citizens dividend, maintain infrastructure, anything even remotely productive with that money (and I do not want to hear any of that "defense spending = ROI from R&D", you are so much more efficient researching helpful things rather than ways to kill people. Where would we be? How much potential has been lost to the bloodlust of some American plutocrats playing a game of money with the lives and potential of billions? You don't feel it directly because the Fed and DoD have gotten smarter about how to act as a cancerous leech on society. Rather than forge a war economy and make it a temporary thing, that you cannot maintain long term, you simply apportion huge swathes of tax revenue and borrowed money to funding your murder games. You use your hold on mainstream media to manipulate the culture into favoring your goals. You use your position as ushers of military might to label any formidable opposition as national traitors. But no, a black hole of hundreds of billions of dollars and unfathomable amounts of human potential is a tremendous drain on any society. It will kill us. It is a slow death, by design. You are not supposed to feel it. But it is self destructive in a way only war can be.
- harryh 11y ago
  You sound like one of those crazy guys in the movies who walks around with a sign around his neck that says "The end is near." And yet here we are. Doing better than ever.
  - littletimmy 11y ago
    Better than ever? That's factually incorrect. The majority of Americans were better off in the late 70's. Median wealth has been declining.
gaius 11y ago
It was von Clausewitz or Bismarck, I don't recall offhand, who called these "cabinet wars", that a country could quietly fight in the background without citizens really being affected at all.

seesomesense 11y ago

The cure for the American love of war is to have more of these wars fought on the American mainland.

aces- 11y ago
The citizenry would be an awful lot less rah-rah over "terrorism" and bad guys if the government was forced to actually ask the public to pay for the costs of war out of pocket. Oh, Saddam is an evildoer with WMDs? Let's get him - that'll be just $5000 per household. I wonder how many people would put their money where their mouth is. Wars have costs, and when those costs are subsidized by money printing, the bulk of society doesn't associate the immense costs of war with the war itself. Therefore wars are effectively waged cost free according to the populace since the US government has monopoly rights to print the world reserve currency. If nation-states lost the ability to mint their own money out of thin air, and instead had to continuously pester and beg the populace to pay for wars out of pocket, we would have less wars. That is the cure for war, a move away from fiat money. Nothing else can be more effective than taking away the military industrial complex's right to print money out of thin air.
zanny 11y ago
Thats the greatest ruse. There will never be another war on American soil. At least anything other than opportunistic strikes - suicide bombers, untraceable ICBM strikes, or attacks by non-governmental groups. You will never see Chinese, Russian, Mexican... any foreign nationalities soliders walking down the streets of New York or LA. A real war, in the modern world, without all the bullshit proxyisms and toying with lives, is resolved with nuclear arms first and foremost. Don't think for a second this country would tolerate anything less than nuclear retaliation to a ground invasion of the mainland USA by a foreign government. Hell, an organized terrorist group would see themselves nuked out of existence if they tried to do a land invasion. It is instant suicide to attack America directly. Why do you think the entire point of the Taliban during the 80s against Russia, and of all the myriad terrorist groups operating against the USA today, was to lead a band of nomads to commit suicide raids and guerrilla attacks against them? They knew they could never "win" a war. They could just make their enemy lose. They worked to help bleed the USSR dry, and are winning by all their own metrics to this day by doing the same to the USA. They hide in caves while we flush a trillion a year down the toilet in the name of security against them. And people wonder how Rome fell.
- meira 11y ago
  This kind of thinking, the same of Fox News and the media uses, is what support this "war on terror". All of great empires thought they would never been invaded or destroyed. Until they were. It would not be that impossible to invade USA if the country's foreign policy keep turning every country in the world into an enemy. A full war against Americans (which is not impossible to happen, as the US is doing bad even to european countries) would put US in a very fragile situation.
  - zanny 11y ago
    All the great empires did not have weapons that could render the planet uninhabitable a hundred times over. Don't act like nuclear arms did not change war. No, the USA would not survive a global war versus every other power. The US has enough missile subs, secret launch bases, and distributed silos to make it impossible to do a joint strike to eliminate the entire American nuclear arsenal. But very few would survive that war - most of the planet would be an irradiated uninhabitable wasteland. I would expect you would have survivors of a global nuclear war, but it would not be a pleasant world to live in. There is no situation where you could do a ground invasion and takeover of any sufficiently nuclear armed first world country where that country would not use nukes as a final measure. That is what they are for. I mean go ahead, try taking over Pakistan and see if they don't nuke you for it, for example.

zanny 11y ago

Except it does. We hurt our performance on the world stage by predominantly throwing away something close to a trillion dollars a year, plus the millions of able bodied Americans wasting their lives killing or enabling it. Take away all the waste from the DoD - from the war on terror - hell, go back, and undo all the rampant spending and insanity that existed throughout the Cold War, without all the nuke stockpiling, all the R&D and intense investment in newer and better arms, all the money we poured into foreign states to play a game of chess on the International stage with lives, cultures, and nations. Instead, spend it on research, NASA, borrow less, tax less, give us a citizens dividend, maintain infrastructure, anything even remotely productive with that money (and I do not want to hear any of that "defense spending = ROI from R&D", you are so much more efficient researching helpful things rather than ways to kill people. Where would we be? How much potential has been lost to the bloodlust of some American plutocrats playing a game of money with the lives and potential of billions? You don't feel it directly because the Fed and DoD have gotten smarter about how to act as a cancerous leech on society. Rather than forge a war economy and make it a temporary thing, that you cannot maintain long term, you simply apportion huge swathes of tax revenue and borrowed money to funding your murder games. You use your hold on mainstream media to manipulate the culture into favoring your goals. You use your position as ushers of military might to label any formidable opposition as national traitors. But no, a black hole of hundreds of billions of dollars and unfathomable amounts of human potential is a tremendous drain on any society. It will kill us. It is a slow death, by design. You are not supposed to feel it. But it is self destructive in a way only war can be.

harryh 11y ago
You sound like one of those crazy guys in the movies who walks around with a sign around his neck that says "The end is near." And yet here we are. Doing better than ever.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  Better than ever? That's factually incorrect. The majority of Americans were better off in the late 70's. Median wealth has been declining.

gaius 11y ago

It was von Clausewitz or Bismarck, I don't recall offhand, who called these "cabinet wars", that a country could quietly fight in the background without citizens really being affected at all.