Three issues collide. One is that a friend sent me to the web page for a movie Why War? Typical Lefty Fundamentalist religion. One piece of pious nonsense in the film is the use of President Eisenhower’s farewell address to suggest that Eisenhower supported the film’s Marxist thesis that profit is the main motive for war. Eisenhower was president during the first eight years of the Cold War build-up and was justifiably warning against a number of problems a democracy could have during a cold war…and we had those problems, including a massive anti-war movement. Eisenhower never warned about any propensity to go to war for profit.
Eisenhower was a general who..
Eisenhower was a general who would never buy the nonsense that war is
waged for profit. Such a thesis could not explain Belfast, Sudan,
Yugoslavia, Chechnya, all the current wars in Africa, all the tribal
wars in the Middle East, Kashmir, all the thousands of religious,
territorial and tribal wars before industrial commerce arose 200 years
ago and certainly not the many wars between Communist countries in the
past century.
Lefty Fundamentalism is a religion and religion is not subject to
empirical evidence. Not even overwhelming mountains of evidence.
Second, the U.S. military budget keeps rising and is now as high as it
was at the end of the Cold War. Of course it is a small proportion of
the U.S. GNP and a much smaller proportion than it was 15 years ago (it
is now 3%). The problem is that most military expenditures have a low
multiplier as I explained in an earlier blog. This is not good for
economic growth, contrary to the ‘war makes profits’ thesis of Lefty
Fundamentalism.
Third, the latest Foreign Affairs has an article about the top echelons of Saddam Hussein’s government. I recommend it to all my readers. The most interesting sentence comes from Ali Hassan al-Majid “ known as Chemical Ali for his use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in 1987, (he) was convinced Iraq no longer possessed WMD but claims that many within Iraq's ruling circle never stopped believing that the weapons still existed.”
Of course, the top echelons of a government are the primary sources that feed information to foreign intelligence services.
Time and again I have posed the question to my Lefty friends: in four years why haven’t we heard from any other nation’s intelligence service that they knew there were no WMD’s? Why haven’t any U.S. intelligence whistleblowers shown the counter evidence about WMDs? And why would any army send its forces, 138,000 troops, into battle with 40 extra pounds of gear to protect against chemical, biological and radiological weapons if they were known to be non-existent? Forty extra pounds of unnecessary gear can be a direct cost of lives.
As I say, “Lefty Fundamentalism is a religion and religion is not subject to empirical evidence. Not even overwhelming mountains of evidence.”