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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (116931)	11/20/2008 5:07:34 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Hi Knighty Tin; Re: "The fact is, war has a large, damaging cost and to try to ignore that cost and have it borne by a few always takes the economy down." Wars tend to help the economy and modern wars, where we build a lot of stuff and then dump it somewhere, help the economy even better. The down effects on the economy do not kick in until the war is over. The down effect is due to all the ex soldiers suddenly out of jobs, and all the armaments spending suddenly going away. (In addition, in some wars, there's a boom, for those who are not blockaded because trade rivals are suppressed from trading, but this does not apply to Iraq / Afghanistan.) The post war bust after WW1 and WW2 are good examples of these. And these were wars that saw a lot of heavy spending. But the Iraq and Afghan wars are not over, at least as far as spending money goes. So the current economic difficulties, (in addition to being worldwide and applying to all Capitalist countries, whether George Bush ruled them or not, and whether they sent troops to Iraq or not), is not related to the war. What you're doing is taking two events which happened to occur at the same time and since one was immoral, and the other was a sign of immorality (the bust that always follows the boom), concluding that they are related. They're not. This is morality based reasoning. Busts always follow booms. This has been going on for several hundred years. US budget deficits in 2007 was 162 billion, down from 300 billion in 2006. Public debt, as a percentage of GDP, reached a peak of about 50% around 1995 and had been dropping fairly steadily ever since. This is incompatible with your claims. Total US debt (public and private) has been roughly steady since it peaked, (also around 1995) as a percentage of GDP. Re: "That cost shared by all Americans, if not equally, at least some sharing in every case, is one of the restraints on a President that helps prevent dumb wars from getting started." The American people were quite upset by the WTC attacks. Due to Vietnam, there was fear that the US couldn't fight a land war in Asia (I still think it cannot), but that was "disproved" by the good result in Afghanistan. The attraction of attacking Iraq would have sucked a war out of Mother Theresa. Bush I and Clinton never normalized relations with Iraq after the Kuwait war, and Iraq had a known history of using secret service attacks against the US. Even though Iraq had apparently not been involved in the WTC attacks it appeared that they would clue in from the attack that it was an easy thing to do. And all this has little to do with any particular person. The logic was there. US bureaucrats, the military, and the press treated Saddam as a bad boy and after Afghanistan, the vast majority of the public and analysts thought that spanking him would be easy. After Bush invaded, his popularity went to 90% and that included a heck of a lot of Democrats. (At the time, I was so angry that I said I would never support the war, and that it was doomed to failure and would destroy the Republican party, do you remember? Now it looks to me like the Republicans will pick up seats in 2010.) Of course it can be argued that Clinton or Obama, or JFK or whoever, wouldn't have invaded Iraq. But I find this argument rather unconvincing. Clinton bombed the crap out of Iraq repeatedly and he didn't even have the excuse of a WTC attack. God knows what he would have done if he'd had the excuse. And the Liberal British government signed up for their share of the punishment in Iraq. For that matter, JFK got us started in Vietnam and another Democrat ramped it up over an 8 year period. What the public wants, the public gets, and the public loves a war, at least at the start. -- Carl