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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (266380)	12/29/2005 6:45:02 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573709

Obsession with military aggression?? I don't think that statement accurately reflects reality. Really? When was the last time we've been invaded? How many times since WW II have we invaded another country? That doesn't make your case. The first part is because we are very strong, have fairly strong allies, and friendly neighbors. The 2nd just indicates that we have invaded other countries. You need a lot more than that to sustain an argument that we are obsessed by military aggression, esp when you consider that many of those invasions where defensive in nature. (Defending others is still an act of defense not offense). If we cut out military budget by a third it wouldn't greatly increase the % of our national income spent on social programs. Why not? Because social spending is much higher than defense spending and because defense spending is a relatively low percentage of our total national income. We are the most militaristic nation on the planet Nonsense. We have a larger military budget than the combined budgets of the three countries on the list just below us. What would you call that? Peace loving? Militaristic does not equal having a big defense budget. There are quite a few countries who are far more focused on our military than we are. We have a more powerful, and expensive military than they do but that's because we are bigger than most of them and richer than any of them. To give a rather extreme example North Korea is far more militaristic than we are. The percent of their population in their military, the role of the military and heavily armed security services in controlling the country, the percent of their wealth they spend on the military, all are far greater then in the US. And North Korea isn't the only country like this, just an obvious example. Some other good examples include China, Syria, and Israel, but I could come up with more. You could probably accurately say that we are the most militaristic large wealthy democracy on the planet. Tim