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Comment by parineum | Hacker News Reader

Part of the reason people voted for "no more wars" was because of the long history of more wars from both parties. Desperate people make desperate choices.

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> long history of more wars from both parties

Which wars were started by Democratic presidents in the last half-century?

Vietnam.

That was more than a half-century ago.

While Kennedy and then Johnson escalated US support to South Vietnam significantly, Eisenhower started it.

And Nixon prolonged it in order to win an election. [1] Regular people would call that treason.

1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vie...

This point came up in a discussion of whether the Iran war is the first US war to be started and lost by the exact same team. Vietnam was floated, but they had a few shift changes before defeat was clear.

Syria, Libya, Kosovo probably more I am just naming the ones off the top of my head.

"started by" here was used to indicate that there was not already a shooting war in progress.

If you want to get technical, the US hasn't been involved in a war since WW2. See how annoying that is?

No more wars means stop putting Americans at risk to kill foreigners.

If you're going to get technical, you need to pick apart the AUMF for Iraq.

In any case, I personally don't think the US interventions in Bosnia or Haiti rose to the level of the colloquial understanding of "no more wars." This is to the extent that the public of 2024 was even broadly aware of those interventions.

Major point is this: in the last 50 years, every GOP president has started a trillion-dollar boondoggle in the Middle East that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths or more (count is still running in Iran, which the President credibly threatens to nuke every other week). Democratic presidents have initiated e.g. peacekeeping missions or the like with definite endpoints and missions. "Both sides" elides all of this as if they are the remotely equivalent.

(I'm on record suggesting that the US military should be reduced to a footprint necessary to defend only the US states and not foreign interests. 75%+ cuts in budget as a start. 11 carrier battle groups to ~4, two per coast. etc.)

> Democratic presidents have initiated e.g. peacekeeping missions or the like with definite endpoints and missions.

You can play word games all you want, this is what people care about:

https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/summaryData/deaths/byYear...

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Depends on what you call a “war” since the last time the US declared war was in WW II.. In terms of military operations, a partial list would probably include:

Democrat Presidents: Bosnia, Haiti, Iran, Kosovo, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.

Republican Presidents: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Grenada, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Panama, Somalia, Syria, and Venezuela.

It is outside the 50 year timeframe, but go back another 10 years and you have Viet Nam which caused more deaths than all the rest combined.

Seems balanced when you put them in a simple list like that, so it might not be obvious that the republican started wars cost many, many orders of magnitude more lives and treasure than the tiny actions attributed to dems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109360

> go back another 10 years and you have Viet Nam

Eisenhower was a Republican when he committed forces to Vietnam.

If sending military advisors to a country is starting a war, the list of wars started by each President will get MUCH larger. (For some reason most people associate the Vietnam war with the President who deliberately lied to congress to get a use of force authorization and then literally sent over half a million troops into war.)

There was literally no evidence voting for Trump would have reasonably led to less wars, and enough evidence, in fact, to the contrary.

aside from the first term? guy lost his marbles after 2020 but there were no new wars in the first term and that was evidence. turns out he has different handlers this time. and dementia. but there were 4 years with no new wars. I liked that.

There weren't any "new wars" during Obama's and Biden's terms either, and Trump was clearly for years before he ran in 2016.

Ukraine is something Russia started and the cost to the US is DoD dollars and military hardware.

Iran is something the US and Israel started. It has led to casualties among American soldiers, civilians in Gulf countries, as well as economic cost that is falling on all of us.

Yes, MAGA ran on a broad platform of chaos, griefing, and personal vendettas. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to connect the dots and know war was on the agenda.

There is a long history of evidence that voting for establishment candidates leads to more wars and Trump didn't start any new wars in his first term and reduced troop deployments in places where existing conflicts were active so I'm not sure what you mean by no evidence. Supporters were happy about that aspect of his first term.

But, like I said, desperate people make desperate choices. If you're a person who feels strongly about something the establishment wing of both parties agrees on, anti-establishment candidates look very appealing, warts and all.

The level of moral fatuousness and practical nonsense your post involves is appalling and hard to unpack.

> There is a long history of evidence that voting for establishment candidates leads to more wars

Literally just the US invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War. There were no "new wars" during the Obama Administration or the Biden Administration. You'd have to stretch the meaning of the word "war" rather far to argue otherwise. This Iran war is a totally unnecessary actual war that has claimed the lives of American soldiers, as well as others.

If someone votes for an openly bellicose, jingoistic, bigoted wanna be "strongman" dictator, they aren't voting for less war. How stupid.

Trump would have had the same outcome if he said "more wars". People voted for the man, not his policies.

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