The trillions in national debt benefits somebody. Somebody somewhere gets those interest payments and they wouldn't have if the U.S had not borrowed from them.
I don't think the US far right is quite that farsighted or quite that cynical. However, I've historically been too optimistic about the American power elite, so I wouldn't take my word for it.
As an aside I never read that Hussein had threatened to flood the market, I read that he threatened, as a negotiating tactic, to withhold oil. Do you have a source for the "flooding the market" claim?
Example: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.h...
For values of "for other things" of creating a massive flood of dollars on the world financial markets, undercutting its value, and precipitating a financial crisis the likes of which the US still hasn't seen.
Truth is the story's likely complicated.
Just a few days ago was the 75th anniversary of Henry Ford getting a medal from Hitler. I guess we learn from history that we don't learn from history.
Those boys aren't so interested in "starving the beast" as they are in feeding their wealthy constituent-donors. We need campaign finance reform.
We blew a trillion bucks on nothing useful. That's destroyed value. That somebody is benefitting in some small way from the side effects of this doesn't change that fact overall.
To reduce it to more comprehensible terms, imagine that I take out a $10,000 loan to buy a car, then crush that car into a cube. That's one less car in the world than before. That's a waste of $10,000 in value. That my creditors benefitted because they got interest off the loan doesn't change that fact.
This perspective, horribly, leans towards moving the large bulk of defense spending into the category of non-essential goods like cable tv, or beer, football, shopping at pottery barn. This is spending with a focus on the psychological state the good induces.
On the other hand, a true believer in the project of us military probably really feels that resources spent on war are actually essential to survival and should be categorized with spending on food, shelter,medical care, insurance.
There's a profound paradox here.
If this was all capitalistic private enterprise, it would be much simpler. The people who saw value in it would contribute whatever money they thought was worthwhile, and that would be the "value" of the effort. I kind of doubt that most of the people who feel the war was necessary would actually put up the $3,000 per person if they had to write a check for it, but who knows.
When you get government involved, the question of value becomes much more complex.
In this case of a trillion dollar war, the cost is to the US taxpayer, and the soldiers who fight the war.
The economic benefits go to military contractors, the various war departments of the USG who need reasons to keep their budgets intact, and holders of the US Government's debt (http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations...)
...a "business" which companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. are certainly doing/planning on doing too, at least indirectly, privately or otherwise under the radar.
They can also simply look at the correlations between the movements of their data and the market movements, and then make their predictions and thus investment decisions. It's not even rocket science.
Given their "Big Data" treasures, I don't think they will be able to resist that temptation.
This is another reason why I generally see a future of decentralization: it's simply a concept that's less prone to corruption and failure.
The existence of nuclear weapons has rendered traditional warfare unprofitable, except against the very weak, and even in those cases only military contractors benefit.
We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories.
I expect in the long drawn out economic warfare to come that cyber espionage and surveillance to be critical advantages & well connected military contractors with access to the NSA's total information awareness database to profit handsomely from insider trading.
Update & Question:
I'm taking a short break from work and wondering why this comment has been down voted twice?
Instead of down voting & unless you just hate ST: DS9 references, can you provide a plausible argument against the inevitability that tapping the entire world's communications will not lead to insider trading?
There are so few terrorists in the world, and so many opportunities to profit from having early access to employment reports, corporate revenue numbers and other economic data.
Please give me a compelling reason why a wiretap on all the worlds communications is more likely to be used to catch terrorists than for simple greed?