Just saw that. What I find interesting is that, from a macroecon standpoint, it's very clear that we are growing weaker in our standing in the world. You can see that as you see other nations start to make demands on us. Can't blame them, really. They seem to have us by the short hairs. I now remember that image of Prez Zero bowing to them at the beginning of his tenure.

rmorris@richardmorris.com It looks like I left out an "s" in the first one.

email kicked back. Rats!

Between DiLorenzo, Ron Paul and Swanson, I do not get the impression of a conspiracy as much as people who are power hungary and simply cooperate. Conspiracies never last long, and rarely work out. The wars appear to me to be much more sinister and driven by the power lust more than anything else. Take a look at Swanson's book, or at least the summary as it is shown on Amazon. These books completely reversed my understanding of history.

You are assuming a lot of conspiracy among government employees that can't figure out how to book a meeting in Outlook.

Suppose we were lied to about WWII. Then what?

Bless you, my son, for thou sayest things so many graspeth not. In short, you are saying (as do I) "If you like war, go fight and do not use my tax money to do it." Swanson's book completely turned my viewpoint on war.

Hi Johnson. The most basic answer is that nowhere in the Constitution allows for our treasure or our troops (they belong to the service of US citizens) to be used for other nations. Our Reps can declare war on another sovereign nation, they can issue letters of Marque and Reprisal (which is what should have been done after 9/11 instead of nation building), or according to the War Powers Act the CIC can repell an attack or use force against an imminent attack overseas on our military, embassies, etc...

If you want to go stop crazed Africans from slaughtering each other you can do it on your own. Or, put money together and pay Blackwater to do it. But Congress, and definitely not the CIC, is authorized to spend my money helping other people in other nations. Is it awful? Sure. But the other problem is we are inconsistent to the extreme. If we were equitable about these interventions we would have turned Saudi Arabia to glass by now. (note the missing 28 pages redacted from the 9/11 report, plus they terrorize their people and kill thousands).

I am a noninterventionist because of that reason, and every time we do this stuff "unexpected consequences" happen. We bomb innocent people and hire ISIS to topple Gaddafi, and it is now a hellhole of Christians being beheaded and mass rapes. It never works out.

If you are working and living for the benefit of other people in other nations, that is non-objectivist.

Spend a few years as a slave and then ask yourself if it was really about 'crony capitalism'.

You are on the wrong website... try this one, it's where Bernie and Hillary get all of their talking points... (Verbatim actually).

http://www.cpusa.org

We do these things as a lesson from WW2... that if we don't remain vigilant, the world descends into chaos and it eventually comes to our shores. Nowhere in your argument do you say that we should have turned the other cheek at Pearl Harbor... instead, it cost us 300,000 lives and millions of wounded casualties.

You see, the world doesn't go after Haiti to steal some of their stupid bananas. If you are a despot looking to conquer territory, you look for the largest and weakest landmass with the most population to enslave. Fortunately, we don't lose very often, and the indisputable fact that we are the leading military force in the world, and the strongest combat capability the world has ever seen, keeps them away. We can project and deploy more force thousands of miles from our shores than 95% of the world can within their home towns.

This isn't a new phenomenon by any means, we were born in blood and we have more or less been at war since the day of our independence..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...

I would also challenge you to identify more than 1 or 2 other countries (out of about 250) that have ever given blood and treasure for the freedom of another people.

That is where you make an incorrect assumption again. The US deploys troops more often to keep the peace by separating combatants, than it does for 'going to war'. When I was in Kigali, Rwanda, people were butchering each other with machetes because someone on the radio told them it was time to cleanse their otherwise harmonious inter-tribal marrying & society. Overnight, husbands started butchering their own wives & kids and then went out after the neighbors they had lived next to for generations. There is no more perfect example of what the world is really like, than that. We were there to provide safe transport for UN food convoys to the 1 million+ refugees that had taken up shelter along the Zaire border, and while making food flights with C-130's, we were being shot at by small arms fire from the ground, before, and after it was obvious we were only flying in rice & fresh water. Starving the civilians was a strategy.

In Bosnia, we were pretty much the pin cushion between 3 warring factions and stupidly took sides with some that we probably wouldn't have post-9/11.

In Addis Ababa, one of the soldiers gave a kid $5.00 for shining his boots and we watched as 2 thugs murdered him for his $5.00 in an alley.

I don't care about the 'optics' of the political motivations or whatever, quite frankly, my default solution for most of those shit-holes would be to nuke it from orbit and let God sort it out. The fact is, small regional conflicts have a nasty habit of expanding into larger conflicts, then drawing in the French or someone, and pretty soon its a bloodbath and we're in their helping our allies (which is exactly what happened in Vietnam by the way). Diffusing the situation quickly and quietly on the onset has proven tremendously more advantageous to us than the wait and see. Obama just bumped up the Syrian presence to like 500.. by later in the year it will be 1000, and if we don't actually do something, we'll be up to our eyeballs in it with another 4000 casualties when a strategic & sustained air campaign at the onset would have driven ISIS to the point that her own enemies would have taken her out and preserved the honor of the Americans that died in Iraq.

There are a lot of undeniable evils that we have done, but on average, the scale has always tipped in our favor. if you think that some leftist authors with their own agenda to push and doing their research on the left-wing websites are going to have full knowledge of what the President of the United States has as far as information provided to them, that can probably never be made public, then you are mistaken. I have zero love for Obama, but I trust that any American in that position makes the hard choices with the information provided to them.

If we had gone to Iraq for oil, we would have kept the oil fields... would seem pretty obvious. The fact is, we really should have just finished the job in 1990 and never went back.

Let's see the post about the conspiracy theories that the CIA orchestrated 9/11... I'm sure you have that in there somewhere....

Actually, the history of the US was that any state could withdraw at any time. States such as VA and tX joined the union only with the express agreement they could leave. Mass threatened to leave when Jefferson illegally proposed the Louisana Purchase.

The South's main grievances were the crony capitalism practiced by the North which required the crony's to get their mordida in order to allow goods to flow to the South.

First of all, I am not picking a fight. Like Schopenhauer, I am more concerned with why people believe what they do than in picking a fight. But your personal experiences do not convince me the US should initiate or provoke wars. As to the details you name, Swanson’s book, that I mentioned originally in this post, deals with each of your statements in detail and shows how we (you and me) were lied to. We believed the lies enough to (in your case) go to war. As a mental exercise, think about what it would take for you to believe you were lied to and your position on the wars is wrong. This is what an open mind does, and I assume the fact you are in the Gulch demonstrates an open mind.

Maybe you shouldn't pick an argument with someone that has actually been there doing the fighting, saw first hand how most governments around the world treat their own people, and how little life seems to matter in terms of value to non-westernized countries. In other words, join the Bernie camp, as none of those followers are military veterans I'm sure.

I'm not taking any agreement position with slavery, or their right to issue their own currency, or establish their own trade agreements, or any other topic. Membership in the United States is not something that can be 'dropped' if the political winds blow a different direction.

As a state senator in Illinois, the only 'grievance' the south really had with him was his membership in the newly-formed Republican party and its anti-slavery positions. This wasn't the era of mass-media and social networking, travel to the south from Illinois was about 2 weeks on horseback. They wouldn't have been able to pick him out of a police lineup and they attacked Fort Sumpter promptly after he took office, basically 90 days later - about the time it would take the pony express to move some messaging around for war planning.

To me it seems you still accept what both of us were told and I only recently learned was wrong. The problem is cognitive dissonance. For most people there are some beliefs are not amendable to change. In fact, most ideological beliefs are not changeable.

The most difficult beliefs for people to examine are those beliefs which have been
(1) held for a long time,
(2) adopted before age of reason, and
(3) most often repeated.

Which explains why it is impossible to have a conversation on the two subjects one should never discuss socially: Religious and political beliefs. Both of these belief sets are indoctrinated by parents, teachers, religious leaders, and other adults, almost from birth, many years before the age of reason, and they are the most often repeatedly “drummed” into them. People will kill based upon their beliefs, but they will not examine whether the belief is true or false.

The more I learn about why any particular war was fought, the more dissillusioned I am about what I am told.

You are right. They are not counted in the 900+ military bases which are active.

Lincoln provoked the war. Just as we are currently provoking war in the Baltic Sea (among other places). There was and is no legal justification for the War for Southern Indpendence or for the way manner in which it was fought by the North. Have you read such books as "The South Was Right" or any of DiLorenzo's books on the subject?

I don't have a problem with that at all, better to be the one that makes the rules, than one to follow them. I've served in 7 overseas engagements in harm's way, mostly in Africa and Bosnia and the former Soviet republics. The leftist notion that there is nobility in poverty, or that we should respect other peoples, etc... is ignorant to the fact that 90% of the United Nations is run by dictators, oligarchs, and religious zealots.

The world literally is on fire now, because we are not leading. In the absence of America, the 90% that are dictators, oligarchs, and zealots go on the march to increase their territory.

We hold our sphere of influence for many reasons, but rule over those peoples is not one of them. We go out of our way to respect their elections and right to self-government, even when it disappoints us to see the bad choices they sometimes make.

If we were doing it for monopolistic access by US corporations to their markets, we wouldn't have tremendous trade imbalances to our deficit. We wouldn't have been shipping grain to the Soviet Union all the way up until Reagan said "No" and was really the hair that broke the camel's back of the Soviet Union. Socialism is terrible for productivity, since the farmer gets paid the same whether they work in the field or not, so why not get a paycheck for doing nothing versus working your ass off all day? Its the same argument for the "Occupy" movement of being the '99%'... 'Occupy a Job' instead of the sidewalk and you will dig your way out of your poverty...

In the absence of American leadership, we have seen what happens. China is building islands in the South China Sea because they don't really do a good job of building aircraft carriers, and that makes the Japanese, Vietnamese, and everyone else very nervous as they are militarizing trade routes and areas where their oil companies are exploring the seabed for future resources. The Russians go it alone in Syria and defend Assad while basically helping ISIS because they don't care what ISIS is doing in Europe. All of the Middle East is basically on fire and will be generations before peace returns.

We're the indispensable country. The world needs a stabilizing force to counter that 90%, and if we stand down, no one else seems willing to 'stand up'.

If you really want to live in poverty... plenty of options outside of US borders...

Suppose, just for sake of discussion, all this was done for different purposes than those stated. Suppose it was to make millions of $ and maintain power.

We did (the CIA), the French probably, probably the Germans, probably the Russians. We were heavily backing the Iraqis in their war against Iran, that lasted from 1980 to 1988, started during the 444 days that US Embassy employees (60+) were seized and held by Iranian students and revolutionaries when they invaded our embassy (an obvious act of war).

Carter, being the wimp he was (and I would argue Obama's hero with his dithering), failed to act, and those 60 diplomats were imprisoned only for being Americans and employees of our government. When I was about 10, everywhere you went, or looked, yellow ribbons were tied around trees in remembrance and solidarity with the hostages. The "Hostages" were the only topic of the news. 444 days, and Carter had eroded the military to the point that we had no idea where they were, no idea how to extract them, and no willingness to fight the Iranians like we should have. We avoided their gunboats with a 'stand off' posture in the Gulf, our only rescue attempt involved a C-130 dropping a fuel bladder in the middle of the desert for a couple of helicopters to refuel at on their way to and from Tehran from aircraft carriers. The plan failed miserably. We were cowering before the Soviets with our hat in our hand.

The hostages were on a plane flying back to the US and touched down on European soil while Reagan was taking the oath of office. Carter likes to take credit, but it is well-known that the Reagan administration made it clear to the Iranians during transition that his first action would be to order an invasion of Iran if they were not released. Wow! It worked! But the libs and media like to show pictures of Carter hammering nails into a Habitat for Humanity home and we are supposed to believe he is an ambassador to the world or something.

It would be intelligence malpractice to NOT arm the Iraqis to a level to completely defend themselves, and potentially take the fight to the Iranians and overthrow their revolutionary government.

We also backed the Shaw of Iran for decades before he was overthrown in 1979... and they had chemical weapons being used against the Iraqis.

It's also possible both were home-grown efforts, both had been sending students to our universities for years and this isn't rocket science, but developing into a weaponized component takes some rudimentary skills. I also build AR-15s, sporting, and black powder rifles in my workshop - yet Hillary thinks that if you can't "buy" a gun, none would ever exist... so having access to American defense contractors, or not, doesn't make or break a chemical weapons program. WWI in Europe was practically medieval from a technology perspective yet they still managed to figure it out pretty efficiently. Nonetheless, the idea that Iran could constitute a weapons program in the middle of a religious zealot's civil war and a fight with its mortal enemy (Iraq) makes the argument a little phony. Hussein may have been able to do so during that time frame, but considerably easier if we gave it to him.

Biological weapons are much more complex, and without advanced western resources, if used, it would almost certainly come from the US+allies or the Russians. There is no evidence those were used though.

The idea that they didn't exist in Iraq though is just left-wing propaganda. It was definitely there. I would doubt there was ever any real threat to the US, and that's a different issue. Whether they existed though is definitely not in question. It's only the Anti-Bush ilk trying to drum up opposition from the Millennials, since the stuff doesn't exist in our grade school text books either, their youngster's "I wanna protest" mentality is easily swayed to that belief.

Neither do 350 other bases that have been mothballed and sold off to the local economy.

I was actually thinking when I posted, you would have to go back to Lincoln to find significant casualties - though he didn't start the battle either and went through a number of generals looking for one willing to 'fight'. The reluctance of northern generals to wage an open war against the south early in the conflict probably (greatly) prolonged the Civil War.

Did you see Ron Paul's article today?
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/04/r...

The point is the embassy guards do not count as a military base.