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Originally Posted by chefhmboyrd
is it safe to assume that all wars are fought over money, money from drugs, money from oil, money from money???????????  |
I don't think that's a safe assumption. I really, really don't. I think it oversimplifies a VERY complicated human behavior and in so doing gets in the way of understanding.
I'm curious are we talking about ALL wars--no matter who fights them--or are we talking only about wars Americans fight or are we talking only wars that Europeans and Americans fight? Is it just modern wars or is it all wars? Are wars fought in defense of a nation also in that category? I ask because the answers to those questions kind of set the dimensions of the discussion.
If it's all wars then it brings up the problem of wars where there was not a clear-cut financial or material gain to be had.
If it's just wars that Americans fight (leaving others to have other reasons to fight wars) then it fails to explain either WW II or Korea.
If it's just wars that Europeans and Americans fight then it fails to explain WW I or WW II.
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Originally Posted by apocalipstic
War, always about money, greed and power.
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So if your nation is attacked--for whatever reason someone might do so--are you saying that your nation should NOT defend itself?
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Originally Posted by MsDemeanor
Wars are fought for one of two reasons, and quite often a combination of both: A) resources (money, land, food, water, minerals, etc.), or B) religion. Even though Shrub seems to have done it because Sadam picked on his daddy and it was a good way to funnel lots of taxpayer dollars to his buddies at Haliburton, etc., that still falls under "resources". Governments don't decide to spend their money and kill their citizens for the fuck of it, they do it because they want something.
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This seems more along the lines of treating war as the complicated phenomena it is. I would, however, add the following: C) national honor and D) largely by accident. I think that most wars we might care to study fall into a combination of those four with each one having different weights.
For example---
WW I--mostly D and C with, perhaps, a sprinkling of A in the peripheries (read what was left of the Ottoman Empire). WW I, at the time it broke out, wasn't what any nation was *trying* to make happen--it just kind of happened because the various national leaderships allowed the situation to get out of hand.
WW II--mostly A and C with a sprinkling of B and D in the case of the European theatre. Hitler invaded Eastern Europe for land (lebensraum) and to rebuild the honor of the German people after the humiliation of WW I. I say D because there are things that England and France probably *could* have done that might have prevented the war but they didn't. For Japan it was A, C, D and B in that order. Japan had legitimate strategic interests in the Western Pacific--being an island nation with very few natural resources not having control of the Straits of Malacca would cause the Japanese high command no end of sleepless nights. They wanted land and control of the waters in their immediate neighborhood. In attacking the United States, they stumbled into a war that was far larger than they had anticipated.
Korea--D, A, C in that order. After WW II, with Japan defeated the Korean peninsula was partitioned on the 38th parallel. One thing led to another and the North Koreans invaded the South. The South was backed by the U.S. and the UN and the North by China and the USSR.
Vietnam--A and D in that order.
Gulf War I -- D and A with a sprinkling of C. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a HUGE miscalculation. He expected the U.S. to sit it out which, of course, we weren't about to do. He stumbled into a larger war in an attempt to grab more oil resources and regain of some Iraq's national honor after the war of attrition that nation had fought with Iran. For the United States, it was a way of redeeming the American military after Vietnam and to begin asserting a stronger presence for the US military in the region in pursuit of goals related to reason A.
Gulf War II -- A and C in that order with a sprinkling of B. The US leadership wants to establish *permanent* hegemony (beyond what we already have) in the region and Iraq is perfect for that purpose. C has to do both with the feeling of the neo-cons that Bush the Elder, Powell and Schwarzkopf didn't finish the job by getting rid of Saddam Hussein AND Bush the Younger wanted to avenge the attempt on his father's life. Oddly enough this is the only war a Western nation has been involved in that had a clear religious dimension to it.