Why has society allowed warring to trump all other of our priorities?

Why do we allow every other need and ambition of our citizenry to take a back seat to warring, especially in these manufactured, petty wars?

Congress is Knee-jerked into rubber stamping each and every defense spending bill and every war supplemental that is shoveled out by the ruling party. Other needs get a miserly nudge. The defense budget is the biggest portion of the budget that is paid for with the product of our struggle and sacrifice.

Why is the State Dept. being used merely as a PR office for warring, rather than pushing against war in pursuit of peace? Wouldn't that help eliminate the atmosphere for perpetual war?

Why do we assume that opportunistic warring takes precedence over every other concern? Why do we continue to support the ravaging of our society to support some confederation of corporatism and their military ambitions, to the detriment of our standing in the world, and our security in all other interests here at home?


Me Book

When we are at war, we don't dare ask for things like education and health care because it would be unpatriotic. This way the Treasury can be raided for special interests with impunity and no one demands accountability because we are at war.

...who whip up the young apes into a frenzy for their own purposes.

Unfortunately, they end up throwing things far more destructive than feces.

Health care doesn't seem as important when your son or brother could come back home in a body bag tomorrow, so I can understand why this is the biggest priority.

On the other hand, can't we do more than one thing at a time? I hear especially Michael Savage talking about pro-choice rallies or gay marriage rallies and he rants and raves that people would be spending their time on this when we are at war. Then a half an hour later he says he's bored of talking about the war and he wants to talk about his dreams or what happened yesterday when he was out on his sailboat. Tell me that's not hypocritical!!!

But we seem to spend most of out time and resources to secure this rhetorical, imaginary win in these countries we have invaded.

Bush's answer to our inevitable loss in Iraq is to send in more troops and allocate more money for them. The best way to stop the body bags would be to end the thing and stop the aggression in Iraq.

I haven't stopped talking and writing against this war since before Bush took us there. I'm not bored with it, I'm sickend by it, and I wonder if we realize that with all of our nation's resources invested in keeping the troops there, there is a self fullfilling mindset that allows us to justify more war because of the deaths that have already occured under our occupation to our soldiers.

With every pursuit there is some sacrifice, but peaceful actions often lead to more peace, preparations for war often encourage the adoption of more militarism and more war. We must admit that we were wrong to invade Iraq. We must be prepared to apologize and withdraw. Far-fetched, maybe, but not an unreasonable option.

We need to value and support the actions and mechanisms of peace and encourage only peace in the absense of a clear threat to the nation or our allies. There is no clear threat, there was no clear threat from Iraq to the U.S. or its allies. All of our efforts should have been to avoid war. All of our actions now should be to avoid more war. Instead, we are perpetuating the conflict there in the name of preserving our militaristic posture around the world, nothing more.

Is it best to arm ourselves, and the world to follow, with the hollow reasoning of keeping up with perceived threats to our ‘security’; or is it more reasonable and more practical to reach out to the world diplomatically, to lessen the animosity toward America that our military interventions have engendered?

Our aggression resigns the nation to a perpetual global threat against the United States and our interests. Diplomacy provides hope that the killing among all countries would end, by the force of our collective resolve; not at the point of a weapon. We should turn our efforts away from preparing for war, and spend as much effort in actions to prevent it, through the U.N., the Red Cross, and every other instigation of peace and aid we can muster.

I agree the real answer was to not have a war, but if we run now, the terrorists will take over and Iraq is the new Afghanistan. Of course it's becoming more and more likely that this will not have a positive outcome no matter what we do, but I think we still owe it to ourselves and the people that died to try and "win" this thing, whatever that might mean.

I don't know. I do know that our approach of bullying the Iraqi people hasn't produced peace, freedom , or liberty. That may not be our job. We may have squandered our credibility to dictate any morality, much less a government. If by trying you mean relinquishing all claims to the resources of Iraq and dismantling the installed 'authority', and bringing our troops home, I would consider that worth trying. If you mean that we should continue cowing the Iraqis into accepting our imposed ruling party there then I would oppose that.

We have relinquished our last thread of justification for invading and continuing our occupation there with the revelations of abuse and torture of detainees and the bombing and shooting of innocent civilians. There is no chance to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis with our continued abusing presence there.

It's not our country. It's not even our region. The U.S. has no right, outside of our overwhelming forces, to invade and occupy a sovereign nation outside of a direct threat to our country or our allies. Iraq posed no such threat. It poses no such threat now.

To believe, as some do, that Iraqis will not forever hold resentment of our occupation is self delusion of the highest order.


"How say you, war or not?"
"Not war, if possible, O king," I said,"lest from the abuse of war,
The desecrated shrine, the trampled year,
The smoldering homestead, and the household flower
Torn from the lintel-all the common wrong-
And smoke go up thro' which I loom to her
Three times a monster: now she lightens scorn
At him that mars her plan, but then would hate
(And every voice she talk'd with ratify it,
And every face she look'd on justify it)
The general foe. More soluable is this knot,
By gentleness than war. I want her love.
What were I nigher this altho' we dash'd
Your cities into shards and catapults,
She would not love;- or brought her chain'd, a slave,
The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord,
Not ever would she love; but brooding turn
The book of scorn, till all my fitting chance
Were caught within the record of her wrongs,
And crush'd to death: and rather, Sire, than this
I would the old God of war himself were dead,
Forgotten, rustling on his iron hills,
Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck,
Or like an old-world mammoth bulk'd in ice, Not to be molten out."

Excerpt from, "The Princess: A Medley" by, Alfred Tennyson

Notice all the uproar when they were trying to close bases and use the peace dividend. It's the sickness of money trumping everything.