The Shakedown

We haven't won a war since WWII and it should be obvious, we aren't really trying to win.

If we fix it so's you can't make money on war,

we'll all forget what we're killing folks for.

-- Woody Guthrie

In 1968 students rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They were protesting the War In Vietnam and the way both parties were determined to keep feeding young Americans to the jungles of Vietnam and they were in support of the anti-war candidate Robert Kennedy running against the establishment candidate Hubert Humphrey.

The drum beat was "We have to stop the Communists from taking over all of South-East Asia". We had to support South Vietnam to stop the "domino effect" which would lead to the Russian communists from militarizing and dominating Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and potentially Laos.

This was all very reminiscent of the motives for our involvement in the Korean War.

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson was escalating his commitments, pouring more money and equipment into the Vietnam war which had been going on for a year, and by 1968 it was simply a grime and directionless mess. Nixon was promising to end it if he was to be elected, but the students weren't buying it. They were convinced the war was nothing more than a way to build the strength of the American economy, to feed the Military Industrial Complex, and to project American hegemony around the world.

After conceding a stand off in Korea, and signing a treaty to stop fighting, it looked like the US was just relocating their battlefield. And the draft age people were the victims of wars that had no exit strategy.

Nixon finally gave in and ordered our soldiers out of Vietnam. The North Vietnamese communist forces took over, nothing terrible happened in the region. In fact, over the last half century, Vietnam and the surrounding countries have become major traders to the US, creating an upsurge in the median income to their citizens.

After 14 years we moved the battlefield to the Middle East. And we created a new bogeyman called Islamic Fundamentalism. We decided that the area was of vital importance because it provided the world with energy supplies and the threat of Russian-backed, radical theological terrorists dominating the whole area of Syria, Iraq and Iran was a threat to our national security.

So once again we stepped in to change the dynamic. We went after the perceived weakest link, Saddam Hussein. We were convinced (or at least inclined) to believe he was developing nuclear weapons, and that gave us the moral authority to declare war on Iraq.

Once we destroyed his military, and most of Iraq's infrastructure, and we discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction there, we moved the battlefield again. Each time, we walked away without the enemy conceding defeat after spending billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.

On to Afghanistan. And now Ukraine. And the theme remains the same.

Let me cut to the chase: There is an unmistakable pattern here…We are not really in these battlefronts to win anything. We are there to create demand for new and better weapons that also cost enormous amounts of money, provide good paying jobs, and make us look like a formidable force around the world. We are playing politics with human lives, with the fortunes of relatively small and insignificant countries, while creating vast amounts of wealth.

We haven't won a war since WWII and it should be obvious, we aren't really trying to win. It is the process that provides us what we want.

For the United States of America, war is simply real estate development. We bulldoze the old order, spend billions of taxpayer dollars to annihilate any resistance, then pay ourselves to rebuild a new, much more US dependent economy.

We get trade partners, natural resource supplies, and a government that stands with us when we go do the same thing to the next part of the world that is vulnerable to the "communist domino effect".

We do this with the one thing no one can interfere with: The power to print US dollars. Which we then hand out as "foreign aid" but is actually invested in weapons we build, then laundered by the victims of "Russian aggression" and eventually finds its way back to the US economy, spent with our massive foreign service contractors, to rebuild the now war torn country.

It is really just another Mafia-style shakedown scheme.