The Ease of Starting Wars

History proves how easy it is to convince the people of a country to go to war. This has always been true. Our leaders convince us that we are in danger and then they offer us a solution to our problems. In modern times, this means handing billions of dollars of taxpayer money to corporations like Raytheon. It works so well that every Democrat votes for doing it over and over in the case of Ukraine. Every member of the most liberal faction of the Democrats goes along with the scheme for the reason stated by Hermann Goering.

Julian Assange:

Populations don’t like wars. They have to be fooled into wars.. Nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies

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Some of the Costs of the U.S. “Wars on Terror”

In the U.S., we tend to think mostly about our own losses, our own wounded and dead. The costs we inflict on other people with our war machine are estimated in Jacob Crosse's article: "Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million." An excerpt:

A staggering new report coauthored by Professor David Vine at the Watson Institute at Brown University conservatively estimates that 37 million people, equivalent to the entire population of Canada, have been forced to flee their home country, or have become internally displaced within it by nearly two decades of unending US imperialist war. The analysis, published by the Costs of War Project, sought to quantify for the first time the number of people displaced by the United States military operations since President George W. Bush declared a “global war on terror” in September 2001 following the still unexplained attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon.

Professor Vine and his coauthors note that the 37 million estimated displaced is a “very conservative estimate,” with the real number of people displaced since September 2001, “closer to 48-59 million.” That is as much as, or more than, all of the displaced persons in World War II and therefore more than any other war in the last century. It is difficult to articulate the levels of misery, poverty, hardship, strife, pain and death visited upon entire societies and endured by millions of people.

The latest Costs of War report focused on eight countries that have been subjected to major US military operations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

. . . The authors estimate that 9.2 million people in Iraq and 7.1 million in Syria have been displaced respectively, in both cases roughly 37 percent of the prewar population. . . .Somalia, where US forces have been operating since 2002, has the highest percentage of displaced persons with 46 percent of the country or nearly 4.2 million people displaced.

Throughout the “war on terror,” the authors estimate between 770,000 and 801,000 civilians and combatants on all sides have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen since US forces began military operations in those countries. The number of “indirect deaths,” that is, those who weren’t confirmed killed by military weaponry, but died due to lack of healthcare, infrastructure, or food as a result of US military operations, embargoes and blockades may exceed 3.1 million, although the authors noted that credible estimates range in excess of 12 million.

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The Risk of Nuclear War is Skyrocketing and Few Seem to Notice

The Ukraine war began Feb 24, 2020. Based on the above estimates, in only 8 months, the risk of nuclear war has increased somewhere between 400% and 2500%. Shouldn't this threat of annihilation be on the headline of every newspaper every day? Shouldn't the cost-benefit analysis of U.S. involvement have been discussed in open hearings in Congress before the U.S. jacked up the risk that we will all die for a territorial dispute involving a country most Americans couldn't have located on a map one year ago?

Is the problem that I'm in my 60s and I remember the terror we all felt during the Cuban Missile crisis? Is it that we are now a generation hooked on video games and violent movies, such that things always work out in the end (or if not, we hit the reboot button or wait for the next episode)?

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Matt Taibbi: Truly, Give Peace a Chance

Matt Taibbi urges that we give peace a chance, especially in light of the abysmal track record of America's war hawks.

We spend a trillion dollars a year on war and none on nonviolence.…

The “domino theory” we used to justify invading Vietnam had roots in Munich conference nightmares of inevitable world domination.… Over the years we similarly invoked Hitler before attacking Iraq (which left Mesopotamia a borderless 8th-century outpost and spurred a horrific refugee problem) and Libya (which replaced a brutal dictator with no government at all), to say nothing of interventions big and small in Syria, Serbia, Iran, and other spots around the globe, often based on similarly dubious terrors about the peril of affronts to American “credibility.” Something like domino-theory fear was behind the post-1991 idea that we needed to meddle in Russian elections (to prevent the spread of communism anew) and push NATO as close to Russia’s borders as possible.…

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the members of this militarist tribe weren’t sad. They were animated as hell and motivated suddenly to churn out Atlantic editorials celebrating the end of the malaise that for about ten minutes hovered over the cause of American power projection after Afghanistan’s collapse. They still suffer from the disease of modern American thought that endorses “regime change” as a solution to every real or imagined security threat, a reflex that, in case anyone forgot, has ended in tears every time it’s been tried in real life. They believe this is the only road out of the Russia-Ukraine mess. They’re welcome to that belief, but those of us who’d like to note their long track records of being not just wrong but insanely so should be able to express ourselves without being branded traitors. Yes, this time it really could be 1938. It could also be 1914, when a chain-reaction of lunatic escalations spun a localized conflict into a global conflagration costing millions of senseless deaths.…

All those disasters took place because both American and Russian societies are built on war as an organizing principle, and this is where John and Yoko were right: we should give peace a chance. We spend a trillion dollars a year on war and none on nonviolence. This problem is visible in Ukraine policy. People who aren’t trained in conflict resolution but are propagandized to believe in idiocies like the “surgical strike” or “acceptable losses” always think even the thorniest political problems have tactical solutions. They’re more likely to play chicken with nuclear annihilation, maybe by blowing up a pipeline, then risk looking weak via a cease-fire proposal.… Anyone who says this is an easy call has not thought this through, especially given our atrocious record when it comes to trying to to decrease international tension through the use of force. By any measure, we suck at it, and unlike previous wars, we can’t afford to screw this one up.

Either way, the hawks being in charge for so long, and beating the drum for campaigns like Russiagate, means there’s no longer a back channel to negotiate an end to what even the president is calling a new Cuban Missile Crisis. Even Biden is murmuring about maybe giving Putin an “off-ramp” to end this thing, but if pundits have their way, that will never happen. They’d prefer escalation, despite the fact that the next step is world war. These people are crazy, and we should be allowed to say so. Could peaceniks really do worse?

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