Egypt and Iraq
It's a sad coincidence that "Curveball" admitted he was proud of starting a war - in which he was an unwitting pawn - that has cost 100,000 lives in the same month that Egypt, with a longer-lived dictator, was able to secure political change relatively peacefully. It seems clear that such a fate could have easily been Iraq's, as well, without the phthisis that war brings in its wake. Clearly the Iraq War is the most clear beacon of war's wastefulness as a social process - so, examining America, how would America's history have been different had it never fought _any_ offensive war?
I don't mean to say that war is unnecessary or unavoidable at times - I'd like, just for the sake of argument (and sidestepping the effect wars have on history), to reimagine American History were Americans never involved in offensive wars, beginning with the American War of Independence.
Had America never fought the War of Independence, thousands of lives would have been saved, billions of dollars (in current money) could have been used for other things, and America would have eventually gained its independence anyways.
It's likely that the American Civil War would thus have not been fought - slavery was banned in the British Empire in the 1830s and the American South could not have fought both the American North and the remaining British Empire. 3+ million casualties and, in today's dollars, $22 _trillion_ wasted - with indirect costs amounting to double that.
Was Communism dismantled more quickly for America's sacrifice in Vietnam? Were the Middle East, Central Asia, and Central America made more safe or libertine for the American government's readiness to equate diplomacy with the comparative advantage of force?
A quote from Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
I don't mean to say that war is unnecessary or unavoidable at times - I'd like, just for the sake of argument (and sidestepping the effect wars have on history), to reimagine American History were Americans never involved in offensive wars, beginning with the American War of Independence.
Had America never fought the War of Independence, thousands of lives would have been saved, billions of dollars (in current money) could have been used for other things, and America would have eventually gained its independence anyways.
It's likely that the American Civil War would thus have not been fought - slavery was banned in the British Empire in the 1830s and the American South could not have fought both the American North and the remaining British Empire. 3+ million casualties and, in today's dollars, $22 _trillion_ wasted - with indirect costs amounting to double that.
Was Communism dismantled more quickly for America's sacrifice in Vietnam? Were the Middle East, Central Asia, and Central America made more safe or libertine for the American government's readiness to equate diplomacy with the comparative advantage of force?
A quote from Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."