DLC/Blue Dog apologists: which wars haven't been mostly about economics?

[yurbud]

That is the control of natural resources, land, trade routes, or access to markets?

Even the ''Good War,'' World War II was about Germany trying to grab land and resources to the East, and Japan trying to take some of our and our allies colonial turf in Asia and the Pacific.

In American history, only the Civil War comes close to passing that test though the South definitely felt their economic position was threatened by Lincoln's very mild plans to let slavery die by not letting it expand.

All of our other wars make economic ''sense'' if you think of those maps you saw of our Westward expansion across North America and then just think of it continuing beyond our shores, first to Central America, the Carribean, & Hawaii, then the Philippines & Cuba, during World War II to Europe & Japan, and in the Cold War, into the Middle East and onto the mainland of Asia, two projects that are still underway.

The army even uses the terminology of our Westward expansion in the current wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, calling areas with hostile locals ''Indian country.''

And if you want to spout crap about us being in the Middle East and Central Asia for any other reason than controlling oil and gas, read a little Pulitzer Prize winning book called THE PRIZE by Daniel Yergin, on the history of oil and the ''Great Game.'' The take away lesson of book is when oil execs call presidents and senators, they do not ask for favors, they give orders.

It pretty much defies history and logic to say that we are occupying Afghanistan over a handful of terrorists when the appropriate course is to hunt them down as individuals, cut them off from their financial sponsors, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and reduce the grievances that allow them to recruit. We have barely done a half-assed job of the first, and the second and third seem not to have been done at all.

When the DLC, Blue Dogs, and GOP spout nonsense about why we are in our current wars, they not only make themselves look corrupt and undemocratic, they make the American people look like morons (or morans as our conservative friends would spell it) to the rest of the world.

[ixion]

1. excellent post

kicked and recommended. :applause:

[Taverner]

2. Read "War is a RACKET" by Gen Smedley Butler

Easy to find - interesting read

Even more interesting is the story behind it

[yurbud]

11. I read his biography too, THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE by Jules Archer..

one of the best books to understand the problems with our foreign policy and domestic politics as well.

It is hard to read history like that and take the idealistic claptrap about war seriously. The time to fight is when you are attacked, and then no one has to ''sell'' the war to you.

[NJmaverick]

3. Ahhh I hate to break it to you, but I am not sorry I don't agree with you

so your attempt to label me (or any other DUer) as an apologists (of any kind) is simply comical.

To get down to business though. The war in Afghanistan was started for the right reasons (even if I, and many others, would have done things differently). The war in Iraq had many motives, including economic ones, and most of those motives were less than noble. Still the deed has been done, time machines don't exist. So we as a nation need to have to look at the current situation and deal with it as best we can. I am pretty sure most Americans were pissed over the 3000+ lives lost in the 9/11 attack rather than the financial losses (even our attackers did not have financial motives, so I think your "all wars are about money" theory has a few more wholes than you realize.

[yurbud]

7. If the wars were about 9/11, we would have invaded Saudi, and killed or captured the Saudi

and Pakistani intel agents who funneled money to the hijackers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september11">Pakistan involvement in 9/11

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2008/03/foia-doc-shows-911commission-lied-about.html">Saudi gov't involvement in 9/11

Invading Afghanistan is a little like punishing a mafia hit by killing the hit man's landlord instead of going after the mafia boss who hired him.

[NJmaverick]

12. Are you suggesting that Al-Qaeda's leaders were not given haven in Afghanistan

because unless you are (and I think if you were most would disagree with you on this factual matter) then you comments don't really apply to the situation. Did we go after the parents of the pilots of planes that attacked Pearl Harbor or did we go after the leaders of the nation that sent them?

[yurbud]

8. Jeffrey Dahmer & Ted Bundy should have used that ''looking forward not back'' excuse

The PR guy that came up with that hatful of shit earned his pay for the day.

[NJmaverick]

15. That's pretty funny. You know I bet you take your hands off the steering wheel when you turn down

the wrong street. After all you don't belong on that street so there is no point in steering anymore.

[yurbud]

25. I don't keep driving down that street for eight years and run over people's grandmothers and kids

[yurbud]

14. Have you read Yergin's THE PRIZE, Stephen Kinzer's OVERTHROW or ANY of the many books

on our covert and overt efforts to control other countries?

How about Cuba and the Philippines, were we worried about the natives rowing over hear and invading with spears of mass destruction, so we had to occupy them for decades for our own protection?

[NJmaverick]

16. I am well versed enough to know that not every endevor this nation has under taken

has been for the most noble of causes.

[yurbud]

19. so a war started by our most openly corrupt president had primarily honorable motives?

Which is why he picked a Unocal consultant with a drug lord brother to be president of Afghanistan?

You don't think maybe it had something to do with oil companies wanting that pipeline route stabilized, defense contractors want an excuse to blow up weapons so they can make new ones, and Wall Street wanting a taste of that heroin income to cover their mistakes?

[NJmaverick]

22. One war while mismanaged was justified

the other absolutely not. Still we can't pretend our nation doesn't have a responsibility for its actions. That means we need accept where we currently are and figure out the best way to resolve things with out making things worse. It's the moral and just thing to do.

[yurbud]

21. why do you suppose we didn't punish Saudi and Pakistan for their role in 9/11?

and what do you think would have been the appropriate action to take against them given that you support the occupation of Afghanistan?

[NJmaverick]

23. One has nukes and the other has oil and a huge IOU from the US

sort of limited our options.

[yurbud]

29. Iraq has oil and that didn't stop us from invading them for supposedly nothing.

It is not that Saudi has oil but that our oil companies already have the best deal they thought they could get there.

If our government were really mad about 9/11, we could have figured out a way to get at the bad actors in Pakistan, by agitating for the restoration of a civilian government, and promising our support to that government if they turned over the ISI officers and government officials involved.

And you may have noticed that in the last couple of years we have suddenly decided to meddle in Pakistan after all. Did new evidence arise of their involvement in 9/11? No. But they did agree to letting Iran and Russia run a pipeline through Pakistan that would compete with the US Afghan route.

[yurbud]

32. in the case of Saudi, that is admitting that business trumps even our physical security

if the business relationship is important enough, you can kill Americans with impunity.

If business is so important it trumps even punishing those most responsible for 9/11, don't you think it could be distorting other foreign policy decisions too, and we are being fed a line of bullshit to keep us from asking too many questions?

[stray cat]

4. Clearly we should still be part of Great Britain!

[yurbud]

9. they were taking more of our economic pie than we thought was fair

[leftstreet]

5. K&R

Outstanding!

[RoyGBiv]

6. Regarding the Civil War ...

If I'm reading the antecedent to "that" correctly, the Civil War doesn't come close to passing any such test on either side of the conflict, not even by the most gracious reading of the intent of either side in waging war.

All wars have an economic foundation of some variety. Viewed through a Marxist lens, that foundation is both crust and core.

The only reason anyone denies this is because it's often harder to sell politically, so you get people denying the root motivations and forcing people into dealing with the reality of the world.

[yurbud]

10. I was being charitable about the civil war. The other reason they don't share the real reasons...

is average people might not just oppose the war, but support it and ask what their share of the loot is.

Fairly compensating average people for their economic contribution cannot be tolerated.

[RoyGBiv]

17. Indeed ...

There is that.

[MisterP]

13. well, there's rampant cultural imperialism

like the Freepers in '02 saying we had to liberate those women who had to wear burqas--in Iraq

the thing is, neocons see "Western civilization"--which they're terrible at defining--as the peak of human existence, the benchmark against which ; the neocons' cultural messianism impels them to launch a Trotskyite world revolution to "liberate" the world from its weird, unsecular Other cultures. Ironically, this movement, led by many ex-Trotskyites, has recreated Stalinism, though without the good parts.

this cultural imperialism has attracted some "secularists" who demand that there be no visible difference within a culture: the headscarf/veil ban was justified as--get this--protecting religious freedom, since merely seeing that another student was Muslim infringed on everyone's rights somehow; the cultural integralists all agreed that nobody could possibly choose something as unWestern as a hijab, so forbidding girls to wear it was really protecting them from a wicked, oppressive, foreign culture that didn't let them wear what they wanted to (head explode). Secularist neocons (as opposed to the "strike down the Muslims for Jayzus's Second Cumming") also agree that Islam is a vile, outdated religion--though they generally say that about all religions--totally ignoring the millions of religous who aren't chanting for holy war, or whose wars are wars of resistance more than the stereotype of crazy-eyed "suiciders" blindly obeying hate-filled mullahs.

[cali]

18. flambait title. Attempting to marginalize anyone who holds any opinion

but one that precious little you deem correct, just sucks. That you have nothing but oozing contempt for everyone who disagrees with sanctimonious you, is pukeworthy.

[yurbud]

24. which part do you consider an insult? Blue Dog, DLC, or apologist?

Apologist is not an insult. In Christian circles it means anyone who defends or explains the faith.

I added that to the title because I wanted to hear a real defense not just from people who agreed with me.

Do you have a legitimate defense or do you just want to stick to the string of far worse insult you unloaded on me compared to the mildly implied one in my subject line?

[cali]

28. codswallop. you're being utterly disengenuous.

Apologist is most certainly an insult and I'll wager there's not a person here who doesn't recognize it as such. And blue dog and DLC are dirty words to the majority posting here.

As for me, I've written OP after OP explaining why I'm so firmly opposed to both these wars, dearie.

[yurbud]

31. both blue dog and DLC are names chosen by those respective groups for themselves

If I wanted to insult them, I would have used the more accurate ''corporate whore.''

[cali]

34. Both Nazi and KKK are names chosen by those respective groups

sorry, that's lame.

[Marr]

20. I don't think all wars are about money.

Wars usually have multiple causes; from religious or ethnic differences, to economic interests, to ideological divides, etc. People fight about power. Money is just one expression of that.

At the same time, you can probably point to just about any war and find war profiteers doing their thing. And ideologues. And religious zealots. War causes upheaval, and anyone with an agenda just loves a little upheaval.

*Disclaimer, I do not consider myself a Blue Dog or moderate.

[yurbud]

26. ethnic differences are which group gets to control the real estate. In the British Isles...

conflict between Britain and Ireland predated the Catholic/ Protestant split. Holding onto Catholicism was one way of sticking it to the man and hoping that other Catholics would come to their aid.

[Marr]

27. Not just control of real estate, but control of oneself and, sadly,

ones' neighbors.

I don't think you can elevate economics above any of these other manifestations of power. People are a lot more than little greed machines. They also identify with whatever they perceive to be their "tribe" and do what they can to increase it's strength. Things like religion or political ideology aren't just levers for mobilizing poor people to fight for the wealthy. They're other facets of a struggle for power between one "tribe" and another.

I don't think we really disagree much here, beyond semantics. I think all wars are driven by one group's desire to hold more power over another, but that's almost a tautology.

[yurbud]

30. we probably do agree. the way to exercise power is to make someone your figurative or literal slave

also, the peons in a society may believe that the war is about religion or ethnic pride, but the financial elite knows otherwise.

If you read the Hossbach Memorandum where Hitler tells his inner circle why he wants to go to war, it is surprisingly pragmatic: they had a growing population and couldn't accommodate them with their resources at the time.

[Spider Jerusalem]

33. The American Civil War was definitely about economics.

Agricultural vs industrial, and there were more issues in play than slavery (the issue of protectionist tariffs, designed to encourage buying the products of emerging American industry, for instance, which made British imports expensive in the non-industrial South).

Ideology is always justification for baser impulses in war.