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Sunday, May 21, 2017

The Costs of Delaying War

I know many libertarians believe that going to war except in a purely defensive manner is a bad idea.  Many tried to use this rather doctrinaire approach to win leftists to their cause during the Iraq War.  (And this netted, what, five or six leftists who suddenly embraced free market capitalism?)

I was watching The Tunisian War, another of the World War II propaganda/documentary films, and part way through, watching this prodigious waste of lives, it suddenly struck me that quantities of steel, aluminum, rubber, lead and brass expended would have built a fairly nice nation all by itself.  A bit later in the film, two pretend soldiers, "Joe," an American, and "George," a Briton actually discuss this material waste and what this will do for the post-war period when it won't have to be wasted on war with the Nazis.  (The Soviet Union, of course, was an ally, so no danger there!)

War is a terrible waste of raw materials, labor to make them into weapons, and people, not just in their own value to themselves and their families and friends, but in some cases to the larger society.  Yes, I mean Henry Moseley, a rising physicist who died at Gallipoli.

Before you think that I am joining the "No war at any price crowd": imagine the resources saved if Hitler had been stopped at the reoccupation of the Rhineland, or at Munich, instead of letting it become all out war, where the cost was far higher.  Similarly, if short fat reaches the point where North Korea has a realistic chance of launching an ICBM at the U.S., or even an IRBM at Japan, the cost of preempting this low-grade but equally evil Hitler in the Clinton/Bush/Obama charley foxtrot, will seem trivial by comparison.  Japan is already have air raid drills, and with good reason.

The cost of war is very high.  The cost of avoiding war is sometimes higher.

1 comment:

  1. And my comment to radio people like Michael Savage, who scream against the "Military Industrial Complex" and the Neocon's who want a war with Russia or China; what makes you think we are not already at war. People think the Second World War didn't begin until the invasion of Poland. And we have people today who want to believe FDR set up Pearl Harbor to get the US into the war in 1941. But why shouldn't we list the Spanish Civil War as the real start of the war in europe, or the invasion of China as the start of the war in Asia. That being said, what then is Syria today, or the continuing killings in Ukraine. What about the recent events in Kashmir, the Chinese government making bases in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or again the island forming by China in the South China Sea. Mother Jones and others think the initial war movements were a single fleet to the Korean Coast. People can't back up far enough to see the full depth of the pre-moves occurring.

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