Re: Not making refugees
I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.
So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.
what does America spend on defence, $600 billion a year?
I’ve seen costs for the Iraq war being bandied about in the trillions.
difficult to turn off the tap, I think.
I’ve been infuriated by the shear cost of the Iraq War simply in economic terms since around 2008. Either they’re looters or they’re freakishly incompetent, and I don’t like either. I’m really hoping this whole Trump thing works out. He’s at least smart enough to realize that you can’t just export democracy to other countries like it was done to Japan - or that you have to actually stay there and make it stick, like Japan.
Of course if you actually notice that not all cultures can support democracy and that hey, you’re going to have to do some real proper imperialism to make it stick and overwrite non-trivial chunks of the local culture, that marks you as right-wing these days…
Maybe I am right wing now. I did, after all, say that if a Communist Revolution emerged, I’d have to back the Anti-Communists. (Struggle sessions and famines aren’t really my thing.)