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Comment by spaetzleesser | Hacker News Reader

I started paying attention to this when I lived close to DC around 2002. Bush was cutting the top tax brackets while ramping up for the Iraq invasion, the defense contractors made record profits (I remember one CEO making around 30 million) and the DC metro was plastered with ads touting the patriotism of the defense contractors. I thought "these guys are making record money, are getting their taxes reduced, try to look like patriots and some clueless young guys have to go to war and die". Since then I honestly think there should be no profit in making weapons while a war is going. It's just not right that some people are raking in the big money without risk while some poor guys have to go and die.

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*some clueless young guys have to go and kill untold numbers of innocent people in another country.

It never ceases to amaze me how citizens of the USA place the vast majority of sympathy to their beloved “troops” and barely any on those who actually get invaded.

Yep. About 5000 American soldiers died in the Iraq War. A tragic loss, undeniably.

Iraqi deaths? Estimated to be between 400,000 and 1,000,000. That doesn't include deaths that will follow for decades from lasting damage and the instability that followed in the region and continues to this day.

People everywhere care more about people like them than about foreigners. German people were more upset about the 200 people killed in the 2021 floods than about the hundreds of thousands killed in the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

It’s sad, but not specifically American.

(That said, I always use the number of Iraqi deaths when arguing that GWB is the worst president of all time.)

Don't forget the lasting effects of depleted Uranium munitions:

https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2019/09/21/new-study-do...

that's a particularly nasty thing to be lobbing around. The shell that just keeps on shellin' long after the war is over.

To go on a tangent, I am curious whether the effect would be any better with lead ammunition residue instead of DU?

I believe that the toxicity of DU comes from its properties as a heavy metal, same as lead, rather than from being radioactive. [0]

[0] Chemical DNA damange effect is a million times higher than radiological according to this: https://zenodo.org/record/1259849

Thanks for the reminder. I remember it being a big deal in the early 2000s but I don’t recall any mention of it in the last 15 years. I had completely forgot about the issue.

Why's that amazing? The media dictates what most people talk about, and how they do it.

Never noticed how topics switch over time depending on what's in the news? That's what people talk about! News switches the main topic, people switch the main topic. The old topic becomes forgotten and it does so quickly.

If you take a closer look, you'll even see that they talk about the thoughts they've read, in the perspective they've received read them. I have little reason to assume it's not like this everywhere.

There will always a part who disagrees, but it will always be a minority compared to the masses, which creates beneficial controversy and keeps people arguing.

And many people pick up terminology or even whole headlines really quick. Sometimes it’s super easy to tell which newspaper/website someone is reading by that.

Even television and entertainment play a huge part. They introduce and normalize issues, and in that way shift the borders of the overton window. It's strange how much of culture is, in a sense, manufactured. With the internet, at least there are some places where you can go to have open conversations now

Those places become less and less, actually.

I've found more and more places where people, under the umbrella of doing good, dictate what's allowed to be said. Often it's not even the actual admins of the channels, but a mob of people outraged-on-behalf-of-others. Powerhungry assholes.

It is kind of fun to just not follow national news and then get into conversations with relatives / friends that do. Most conversations are really pre-programmed including the views that they will have. "Telegram is bad because it is used by extremists" for example. The most egregious example being COVID of course. The different national narratives were slightly out of sync at all times, so that people got told the Vaccines were effective at preventing infection, spread and the "way out", while at the same time another country was already running Booster programs because two doses were not enough and weren't even effectively preventing hospitalisations after 6 months.

"It never ceases to amaze me how citizens of the USA place the vast majority of sympathy to their beloved “troops” and barely any on those who actually get invaded."

Yes - but don't confuse average people in the street with the ra-ra'ing media. Especially in war situations, it is the media's job to propagandise the populace, and ensure that 'the people' are behind whatever it is they are doing. Dissenting opinions will not get any air.

Considering how those same troops are treated (or, more aptly, not treated) after they become veterans, that sympathy isn't exactly worth much either.

> Since then I honestly think there should be no profit in making weapons while a war is going.

It is an interesting thought but ... if the government tells the industrial chain "you aren't getting paid for this" then there is a pretty high chance the war will be lost. Being optimistic, maybe it could work for one war. Then the next war people ask "where are our weapons?" and the answer is "there are none".

There is really only one solution to DC's warmongering - someone needs to be held accountable for constantly lying and sleepwalking the US into wars. And not the weapons manufacturers, the actual politicians who are pretending that they didn't realise there were billions-to-trillions being sunk into blowing up taxpayer dollars to kill random goat herders.

The public seems pretty peaceful, anti-war rhetoric has been doing well for a while. They just keep getting distracted by political issues (which are obvious distractions if you look at them in context of the US's defence & fiscal policies).

So first, looking at recent decades' experience doesn't seem to support a "arms profiteering = victory" correlation.

Second, historically... actively curbing private profiteering has generally been considered a crucial part of a successful wartime economy. Post WWII conflicts didn't really have a "war economy" but the principle, IMO, stands.

The US hasn't fought a serious war in recent decades. They've been bullying countries that practically couldn't fight back. A war against someone with an actual military (Russia, China, India) is different.

There is a great argument that they shouldn't be bullying people. It is a disgrace that the people who benefit from the bullying are getting rich. The bullying doesn't make the US strong either, it probably rots the military in strange ways. But that doesn't change the basic dynamic that the people who support the US war machine need to be paid or the machine will rust and become ineffective. The old maxim "he who wants peace, prepares for war" is a good hint at what will happen if the US tries to curtail war by cutting off funding to their suppliers. Real wars will be started and the US military would lose them.

I don't disagree, but I think you're neglecting to consider that there is a relationship between defense contractors making money and politicians making war. Not per say causal, a more complex one than that, but incentives can align and push things into happening even in the absence of explicit quid pro quo. Eg, defense contractors can spread projects out over many states to maximize the political impact of their economic activity; politicians observe that war brings money into their state; their incentives have become more aligned, but no laws were broken or bribes exchanged.

There are many ways for this to happen, and all of them occur (to some degree) simultaneously and the impact is cumulative.

The result is that you cannot create a lasting solution by addressing one side of the equation or the other. You have to address them both, simultaneously, or the system will form again for exactly the reasons if formed before.

...then there is a pretty high chance the war will be lost.

That is the status quo. USA military has not won a war in my parents' lifetimes. USA military is optimized to consume resources, not to accomplish traditional military objectives.

The first Iraq war could be considered a victory. Clear objectives, once achieved the war stopped. Bush Sr was smart enough not to expand the war although a lot of people were pushing for a march into Baghdad.

That war didn't "stop", since USA military remained in Arabia for reasons. This occupation was cited as the reason for the 9/11 attacks. So, the enlisted did their jobs but the end result makes it feel sort of weird to call this a victory.

Well, we also say that the allies won the first world war, even though many people see the harsh treatment of Germany as contributing to the second world war.

(So I think that calling both of them victories is reasonable. If you want, you can also call both of them failures. But it seems a bit weird to call one a victory and the other not.)

Hey what about Grenada? I remember this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbreak_Ridge celebrating the victory!

Also... f2r is correct as usual.

"- someone needs to be held accountable for constantly lying and sleepwalking the US into wars."

I'm forever whingeing on HN about this. The real problem is that much of the citizenry has lost faith and trust in its leaders and in many of its longstanding institutions and rightly so given the never-ending scandals.

We need a new covenant - a formal undestanding - between the Government and the people but I, like millions of others, have little clue where to begin.

Don't they have elections for that purpose?

The should, but with modern politics such matters are only ever skirted around the edges. The real issues nearly always remain unresolved.

selling guns is just a side business, the actual profit is in: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

USA loves armed conflict so much it pays the EU to run their junior league fighters NATO. Just can't get enough of it.

money laundering at bigger scale... tax -> war -> defense budget -> military complex manufacturers

The idea of a government, especially the US, laundering money doesn't really make any sense. Generally, the point of laundering money is to pay taxes on it so it can enter the financial system. Governments (and especially the US who has the most control of international monetary pipelines like SWIFT) can freely do what they want with their money generally, at least within their own countries. Their money is going to make it into the financial system without any laundering.

Laundering as a term might not be a good fit, but the parent comment's main claim that war is a vehicle for moving public money into private pockets is absolutely correct

Agree but we have other words specifically for that: grift, corruption, kickbacks.

War is definitely a racket but that racket isn't money laundering. The racket isn't about obfuscating the origin of the money but to direct it to certain parties

it does, the point is take tax revenue and transfer it to rich buddies, now if it requires starting wars and spending trillions, so be it as long as your buddies end up getting few trillions from it

Money laundering != robbery

It means concealing the origins of illicitly generated revenue.

The music stops the day USD losses it’s reserve currency status. Which there is a good chance of us seeing in your lifetime.

With respect, you mean 'The music stops the day USD loses its reserve currency status.'.

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.” - John Stuart Mill

You must agree that, by the standards of this paragraph, most wars waged by people should first be against their own current leaders.

> Since then I honestly think there should be no profit in making weapons while a war is going.

Why should the weapons manufacturers be left out while oil companies, mercenary corps, and construction/logistics companies get all of the action? "Everybody" deserves their place at the feeding trough.

Maybe once a war starts officially the whole economy should go into a non profit mode. I think that would make a lot of people much less interested in waging wars.

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