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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Khymn who wrote (232)	11/5/2008 5:50:29 PM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

"You know, long long time ago when everything made more sense, when a nation goes to a war and wins, then usually the winner got all the goodies like women, gold, and oil etc." where have you've been, we won WW2 and spent billions rebuilding Germany and Japan and are still spending there. we didn't get any gold, oil etc from them

To: Jon Khymn who wrote (232)	11/6/2008 11:28:40 AM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Respond to of 103300

Believe it or not, I was one of those die hard Republican for past 20 years. Never crossed the line, not even once until few days ago. That's quite possible, I certainly would not call you a liar for saying it. But many people say such things and we have no way of really knowing that they are true. More importantly they aren't very meaningful. The fact that you changed your mind doesn't mean your particularly likely to be right now. You know, long long time ago when everything made more sense, when a nation goes to a war and wins, then usually the winner got all the goodies like women, gold, and oil etc. That isn't the way the world works today. Wars of conquest are frowned on and generally less accepted than they have been in the past. Also wars of conquest today are less likely to be profitable than in the past, and still would be even if they where accepted in terms of domestic and international politics. First of all modern war is more expensive in terms of money (at least in total cost, per soldier cost, or cost per citizen in the country at war, in terms of percentage of GDP perhaps not so much), also most of the value of the production in many countries is from from people working in complex ways, not simple labor or natural resources (although in oil producing states and some producers of other resources this might not be the case). Another point is that slavery isn't accepted any more so you can't enslave the conquered enemy (and even if you could and did, again simple labor is a less important part of the economy of the world). And nationalism is a bigger factor, so people are less likely to accept the new conqueror and you have to put more effort and money in to controlling them if you try to conquer them. And terrorism and low level guerrilla warfare is easier for the conquered people with modern technology than it was in the past. If they used our tax money to send the troops, shouldn't they share that black oil with us, too? They need to rebuild their country, also despite all their oil wealth they are much poorer than we are. Also we initiated the action to free them from Saddam, it wasn't as if the majority of Iraqi's signified they wanted to get rid of him and formally asked us for their help (not that such an action would have been possible under Iraq's regime). If you make an analogy to interpersonal relationships rather than international ones, would you charge or expect payment from a victim of domestic abuse that you had rescued?