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WAR, who benefits?

Bill Thompson said:
Are all wars bad? Let me put it another way, are all wars worse than the alternative in every case? Would Naziism and Japanese Militarism have gone quietly into the night without war?
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But look at the big picture - the cost/benefit of WW2 ended up at about zero. Huge numbers of people were freed from Nazi terror, but more ended up with Starlinst terror. Yes Western Europe came out in front. But the rest of Europe literally got pushed under a bus

The same with the Japanese expansion. Chinese communism was struggling, and if memory servered was pushed back to one major stronghold. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria destablised that war and ultimately a half a billion people got the pleasure of living through Mao's brand of purging and cultural revolutions.
 
This thread is a thread I started back in 2007 on a similar reason. Not because I really believe that, just because I wanted to explore the question and see where we get. I don't believe that the war in Iraq was started for such a cynical reason, but there is plenty of fodder for those who want to think that might be the case by building a conspiracy theory centered around Dick Cheney. Halliburton's stock price went up a lot starting in Spring of 2003. I'm sure that wasn't a factor in Cheney's thinking, but a conspiracy-minded person would probably not see it that way.

What can I say to convince Tapio? The facts also fit a more comprehensive, less cynical explanation, which is that there were also many reasons other than profit for going to war. Those reasons were mistaken, but they seemed to make sense at the time. When facts are consistent with more than one theory, you should at least consider the theories to be not yet proven. Also be aware of the possibility of confirmation bias. If you only look for evidence to confirm one theory, you will be more likely to find evidence for that theory. This is confirmation bias.
 
Tapio said:
Mind you, I'm not alleging anything. I'm discussing my belief, which is based on something I've heard, seen and read (and which I'm definitely not claiming to necessarily be compatible with reality). It might be my poor understanding of the intricacies in the English language, but I think there is a difference. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
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I'm not sure there is a difference, really. Any time you're disccussing your belief, you're stating that you believe certain things are true, factual. And until you effectively substantiate these statements with good evidence and sound reasoning, these statements are only allegations of fact.

That's what the word "allege" means. What we are trying to do here is figure out if your allegations have any basis; whether or not they can be upgraded from allegations of fact to demonstrations of fact.

You're welcome to believe whatever you want, and you'll find plenty of people on these forums who are happy to discuss your beliefs with you. But part of that discussion will, for some people, naturally involve an inquiry into the nature of your beliefs as allegations vs. demonstrations.

Please understand that I don't use "allegations" as an insult, but rather as a clarifying term, to help us understand at what point we are in the discussion, and what direction I (and, I hope, you) intend to take the discussion. We are at the allegation stage, and hope to upgrade to the demonstration stage.

Tapio said:
Thank you for this. It seems obvious that things are done like this, and I don't think there's any reason this kind of practice should be altered. I do think that the people ordering the job should be ever so vigilant to notice if, at some point, they could use local companies and manpower to do some jobs. The contracts should, in my opinion, be made so this would be possible.
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I'm not sure this is a sound policy.

Take LOGCAP, for example. Under the terms of the contract, KBR must keep excess capacity on hand, ready for delivery on demand to an unspecified time and place. This is costly for KBR to do. And if the demand arises, it is even more costly for KBR to actually deliver the contracted goods and services. As the contract currently stands, KBR will recover all these costs when it is paid for delivering the contracted goods and services.

But what if some bureaucrat suddenly decides that a local company can do the job? All of the costs that KBR sunk into readiness are now lost... unless you want to pay double--once to cover KBR's readiness costs under LOGCAP, and once to cover the local contractor's costs for actually doing the work.

Or it could be that KBR declines to bid for the LOGCAP contract at all, on the principle that it's a waste of time to bid on a contract if winning the contract doesn't actually guarantee that they'll get the work and get the profits for doing the work. And that would be fine, too, until you find yourself in a scenario where there isn't a local company that can do the work, and now KBR is charging five times the original contract rate, to cover the costs of a last-minute crash program.

And speaking of last-minute crash programs, that's precisely what contracting locally on an ad-hoc basis would amount to. Instead of having the luxury of years of peacetime to arrive at a sound, stable, reliable agreement with an established service provider with a proven track record, plenty of infrastructure, and a robust and lengthy audit trail; you end up on the battlefield, in the middle of a war, trying to verify that some local contractor can actually deliver what you require, on time, on target, on budget, and on quality. You'll have to set up all of your auditing and quality control on the fly, across language and cultural barriers, in a region whose commercial infrastructure you and your enemies are actively destroying as part of the war effort.

But the biggest problem with this idea is, "the people ordering the job should be ever so vigilant to notice if, at some point, they could use local companies and manpower to do some jobs".

We should all be ever so vigilant, in everything we do. But that's not the way people are. People are incompetent, ignorant, overworked, underpaid, inexperienced, corrupt, confused, and often times just plain contrary. I'm deeply suspicious of any solution that depends for its success on the superlative qualities of the people implementing it. I'd much prefer solutions that are designed to succeed in spite of the human factors involved.
 
Thank you, theprestige.

This is exactly the kind of discussion I'm hoping for. You have helped me to see a side I haven't thought about in the subject.

As for allegation vs. belief, I feel you've helped me on this one too. To cut it simple, let's consider the links I've posted as my demonstration of what has led me to allege that what I've stated before.

So, the next step would be to review the links, right? Any volunteers?
 
Thank you as well, Puppycow!

I'll gladly check out the thread you started.

I am well aware of confirmation bias. That's why I've tried to find critique on my belief as it has formed. Maybe it's just my poor mining skills, but I really haven't found anything convincing enough to disregard my belief completely (no, you can't say anything to convince me, but you can lead me to evidence which will speak for itself :)). Perhaps your thread will help. I'll get back to you on it.

That's one reason why I started this thread. To make another go at testing the evidence for my belief. Oh yeah, I must once again emphasize I don't believe money was the only reason for invading Iraq and letting the stuff there go down like it did. But I do believe it was one of the main reasons anyway...AND I definitely am not a conspiracy-loonie. I'm just a guy with an endless fever to finding out how things really are.
 
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Nobody profits. Everyone's environment is degraded a little and everyone's taxes go up.

But we get to salute flags and stuff.
 
It's certainly true there are companies who "profit from war" by supplying the military etc., but someone profits from virtually any event.
If the rate of rape increases, pepper spray/taser companies will probably increase their profit, but I doubt pepper spray companies are enacting rape campaigns.
 
Bill Thompson said:
Human existance benefits from war.
9-11-2001 has shown that, like many species, the herd needs to be thinned from time to time.
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Humankind could not possibly get less benefit, unless war was renamed disease and carried out by bacteria and viruses.

The resources, the disruption, the destruction of progress and lack of thinking makes war the greatest drain our society has ever had. If we had dedicated the energy we put into warfare into science, the results would be inconceivably greater for our race.
 
GreyICE said:
Humankind could not possibly get less benefit, unless war was renamed disease and carried out by bacteria and viruses.

The resources, the disruption, the destruction of progress and lack of thinking makes war the greatest drain our society has ever had. If we had dedicated the energy we put into warfare into science, the results would be inconceivably greater for our race.
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Well said. That's exactly why I feel so appalled by (as I believe to be the case) people actually using their influence in favor of war, for purposes of personal greed. I could understand and even advocate going to war if the reasons were based on as solid evidence as possible of the whole of humankind, in the end, truly benefitting from it.

But for simple greed for wealth/control over wealth, sparks up rage in me.
 
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Tapio said:
Well said. That's exactly why I feel so appalled by (as I believe to be the case) people actually using their influence in favor of war, for purposes of personal greed. I could understand and even advocate going to war if the reasons were based on as solid evidence as possible of the whole of humankind, in the end, truly benefitting from it.
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Care to give some examples of wars in which every member of humankind benefited?

Tapio said:
But for simple greed for wealth/control over wealth, sparks up rage in me.
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The thing is that an opponent of any war, for whatever reason, is always going to allege that it is all about "wealth/greed." If the US had gone into Rwanda to stop the genocide there would have been throngs, huge throngs, of people all screaming at the top of their lungs that we were only there for "wealth/greed" even if it was absolutely only about stopping the genocide.
 
INRM said:
The stuff on the most vicious war profiteers in the OP was pretty interesting, particularly the a link on the Veritas Capital Fund/DynCorp entry, which talks about among other things BAE-Systems and their RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) which is just awful...

http://www.businesspundit.com/the-25-most-vicious-iraq-war profiteers/
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/10/04/p19985

This is really awful...

INRM
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Sorry, I'm not sure are you being sarcastic or expressing genuine concern...

If your comment was sarcasm, would you mind pointing out exactly what part of the text you think is false and guide me towards evidence supporting your view, thank you.

If it was genuine concern, I'd like to know if you have ideas on what a layman could possibly do about this kind of stuff...because just watching it unfold through the screen, unable to act in any way is...well, to me, frustrating to say the least. Supporting groups like Avaaz just doesn't feel like enough is being done.
 
Puppycow said:
Halliburton's stock price went up a lot starting in Spring of 2003. I'm sure that wasn't a factor in Cheney's thinking, but a conspiracy-minded person would probably not see it that way.
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Unlike you, I don't pretend to be able to read Cheney's mind. But the fact that defense-related stocks go up in times of war is bleedingly obvious.

His Haliburton stocks may or may not have been the overriding motivation in Cheney's thinking, but the fact that he's no complete moron means he must have considered it. The only question is how much it factored into his decision, not if.

You mention bias. The chance to make millions depending on your decision is sure to bias anyone.
 
Travis said:
Care to give some examples of wars in which every member of humankind benefited?
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I didn't write "every member of humankind", but whole of humankind, which to me are two different things. I believe there aren't wars like this. That's the point. War is always devastating to most participants. That's why the kind of evidence I was talking about would be extremely rarely acquired. And, if war was used as a tool only in the light of this kind of evidence, wars would be extremely rare as well.

This, of course, is utopistic, I have no delusions about that. As it is, we don't seem to have the means of which to control even the most simple "war-abuse" (meaning the use of war for any other reason than for the evidence-based benefit of mankind as a whole).

Travis said:
The thing is that an opponent of any war, for whatever reason, is always going to allege that it is all about "wealth/greed." If the US had gone into Rwanda to stop the genocide there would have been throngs, huge throngs, of people all screaming at the top of their lungs that we were only there for "wealth/greed" even if it was absolutely only about stopping the genocide.
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Might be so, but it really doesn't matter if the evidence which these "throngs of people" base their beliefs on, is discredited under close scrutiny. I say let them rant, but offer solid evidence which debunks theirs. As long as you don't have the means of showing these people that what they hold as evidence really can't be counted as such, I think you'd be wise not to assume (not saying you are) they'll just give up their beliefs because you (or anybody else) merely says so. Of course, this doesn't mean all people will believe your debunking evidence, but I'm certain some (like myself) will, if it adds up.

As for myself, I'm still waiting. Ready as can be to have the evidence for my belief get debunked.
 
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Actually, puppycow...

What egslim quoted made me think...could you explain how you can be sure of what Cheney thought or didn't think?
 
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