Reply #25: More bullshit.

[JackRiddler]

If jobs are what it's all about we could have had more and better by spending on a railway system, mass transit, the development of alternative energy, a schools system and health care to be proud of, and just about a million other things other than planting graveyards and rubbled cities and missile silos and nuclear waste dumps all over the world.

To take one of countless examples, why did the US save Saddam Hussein twice, in 1985-87 and again at the end of Gulf War I? In the late 1990s we could have put $50 billion into an Iraqi development fund in escrow, payable to the first civilian government after an internationally monitored legitimate election. Within three years, Saddam's own generals would have taken care of him and effected a transition. It would have cost 20 to 50 times less than the violent path that was taken instead. Money for domestic prosperity instead of foreign adventure.

There is nothing rational or beneficial about a war economy. It's always been insane, and only in the rarest cases actually forced on the US.

It's sad that Eisenhower could say things about the pointlessness of war and military spending that 60 years later are considered far more radical than in his own (thoroughly paranoid) era. They could still imagine peace, now war is the everyday condition.