Re:Eugene Debs Was Jailed for Speaking Out Against WWI, 100 ...
by scarecrowbob on Monday June 18, 2018 @11:16AM
(#17338840)
Many things that are profoundly expensive involve someone getting paid for them.
Re:Eugene Debs Was Jailed for Speaking Out Against WWI, 100 ...
by anon23423532 on Monday June 18, 2018 @12:57PM
(#17339733)
The iraq war had majority support because the intel community lied to the country and told them if we didn't go fight that millions would die from "weapons of mass destruction". In reality it was because Sadam had started selling oil in Euros instead of dollars
Re:Eugene Debs Was Jailed for Speaking Out Against WWI, 100 ...
by jcranmer on Monday June 18, 2018 @01:06PM
(#17339820)
This is exactly the kind of conspiracy sentiment I decried in my post.
Saddam Hussein had been playing a game of pretending that he had WMDs throughout most of the 1990s up to the Iraq War. The US intelligence community took those claims too much at face value, and when the UN inspectors went in to evaluate the evidence, they didn't say that Iraq had no WMDs, they said they couldn't find evidence of WMDs but the Iraqis were being too shifty to draw a firm conclusion. Unfortunately for Saddam, the Bush administration took this only reinforcing earlier beliefs that Iraq was fundamentally untrustworthy and hell-bent on WMDs, and was willing to go to war even without rock-solid evidence (unlike the EU, which saw the lack of evidence as a good reason to do nothing).
War is popular. I mean, look at how much of our modern entertainment glorifies war. The military is generally and genuinely the most popular public institution. The problem is, when a war loses its momentum, people lose their enthusiasm really quickly. People forget that the Iraq War, for example, actually had majority support when it broke out.
War profiteers certainly exist, but they are a tiny minority, even of the military-industrial complex. There is a much larger segment of industry that is hurt by war: war means a loss of external markets, disruption of supply chains, increased cost of resources, higher taxes, lower internal demand, and massive destruction of property (should the war be fought on your soil).
War is not profitable. The one thing that war is most closely connected with is higher taxes. The inability to pay for wars is probably the single largest contributor to the downfall of governments in recorded history.