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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (134753)	5/28/2004 6:02:58 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

Yes, Maurice, attempting to predict the future is a useful skill. And making the future turn out the way you want it to, is an even better skill. But not when it comes to making war. There is a clear historical pattern: 1. Leaders of nations (Presidents, Kings, etc.) can silence dissent, and increase their power and spendable money, during war-time. 2. Therefore, Executives of nations have an inherent tendency to start wars. The Founding Fathers were quite clear on this. 3. Wars are generally not in the interests of the cannon fodder and tax-payers who bear the costs. 4. Therefore, Executives have to lie, usually, to create support for their wars. 5. The most effective lie, is to scare people with an imaginary threat. Or manufacture an "incident". The Red Menace. The Tonkin Gulf Incident. "Remember the Maine" (turns out the Spanish didn't sink it.) Iraqi WMD. 6. If you accept the "preventive war" or "forward defense" doctrines, the result will be more wars of aggression, because the Executive (with all the apparatus of government at his disposal, to manufacture and disseminate the needed facts), can always find a way to scare the citizenry. 7. If all nations would only make war when they are attacked, there wouldn't be any wars. If nations make war, when they imagine somebody sometime might attack them, wars will continue to be common.