In the case of the US it's usually the truth. The last 3 major US wars were not fighting Nazis; the last 3 major US wars were mostly imperialistic BS; the last 3 major US wars resulted in 20-30 million killed in 37 nations[1].
Or put another way, just because violent predator X(with a long history of unjustly attacking others) managed to take down another worse violent predator Y doesn't mean you should continue to arm and support violent predator X.
1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...
> The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation.
Sure, the US did stuff, but you're denying the agency of the Soviet Union (and Afghanistan, for that matter) in actually doing all the killing.
The US has killed enough people directly without blaming it for all armed conflicts since WWII.
It was definitely a moral failure on the US side to support a known genocidal group based on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"-type reasoning, but I don't think you can hold the US directly responsible for the victims that were already dead at the time.
There is still debate about whether the use of nukes was at all justifiable, a lot of the motivation for researchers was to stop the Nazis from getting there first, not beating Japan into submission.
That said, this isn't WW2. The US has the largest military on Earth and the most advanced weapon systems. US drone strikes are killing targets in civilian areas without repercussions. The POTUS has the authorisation to wage war against whomever he chooses as long as he can somehow relate them to someone who was involved in 9/11. Heck, the invasion of Iraq even violated international law with no repercussions.
The US military (CIA included) can pretty much do what it pleases and kill people whenever and wherever it wants. Don't want to kill right now? Off to Guantanamo they go. If they happen to be a US citizen just say they're an enemy combatant and make sure they never see a domestic court of law. Even torture is permissible.
If you're worried the US might not be sufficiently equipped to become a dictatorial global authority, you haven't been paying attention.
I acknowledge some warfare may be legitimate (having been bombed myself), but arms companies don't stop at selling to your personal favorite army which you consider morally right, they keep looking for more business abroad.
I don't want to be the one realizing I'm sitting in a cozy air-conditioned office and having made money from the messed up warfare in some distant far-away country, having a large financial incentive to cause more conflict there.
Your words, I’m asking who’s security? Our security while we pretend to own the world? Our security against invasion? How secure do we need to be, when we can already end all human life in 45 minutes?
Accounts that post prodigious low-quality comments, especially ones that specialize on all the grandiose themes, are particularly damaging to signal/noise ratio, and that is what we care about here.
You also broke the site guidelines repeatedly after we asked you not to, and went into ideological flamewar repeatedly after we asked you not to. I have to conclude that this is not an account that wants to use HN as intended.
Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad. There are good times to use weapons.
An obvious one was at the time of WWII. If the clever people had refused to work on weapons, things would have finished up potentially a lot worse for mankind generally.
And perhaps in our medium term future, as climate change becomes more and more real, a critical mass of people will decry the continued burning of fossil fuels. And if retrograde nations continue to poison our common resource, then maybe some global police force will need weapons to stop them.