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The Laws of War
by Bob Wallace
[email protected]

Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise

1. War is a racket.
2. Soldiers are pawns.
3. Rich's man fight, poor man's war.

"War is a Racket" is the famous essay by Smedley Butler, a Marine General who said for years he made war "long and hard" until he finally woke up to what he was doing. In his essay he pointed out that wars are started for economic reasons—for money. And that he was just a thug and enforcer for corporate interests in other countries.

Or, as St. Paul also so famously wrote, the lust (not love) of money is the root of all evil. While that saying may not be totally accurate, it certainly explains a lot of the problems in the world when it comes to killing or oppressing people for financial gain. In the U.S., one needs look no further than the Federal Reserve Bank, which, being a private bank in charge of our money supply, is not federal, has no reserves, and most definitely is not a bank.

That lust for money explains our own War between the States, inaccurately called the Civil War. It wasn't about slavery; it was about the North trying to economically exploit the South. We had some 620,000 casualties, more than all our other wars combined.

Currently the U.S. government has wars going in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? Three things, in my opinion: oil, empire, and Israel. Iraq has oil and Afghanistan has enormous mineral wealth. Again, it's about money.

The rich don't fight the wars. George Bush hid in the National Guard during Vietnam. He could have volunteered to fight, but did not. Dick Cheney, whose bad ticker is soon going to send him to Hell, took five deferments during Vietnam, saying he had "other priorities."

Yet when both of these evil men gained political power they had no problems starting two wars in the Middle East. This is why both are called, correctly, "chickenhawks": I avoided fighting when it was my turn, but since it's your turn, you should fight.

If the rich start wars, who fights them? Certainly not the rich, or even the middle class. It's the poor who fight them, people who don't have the education, or the brains to get a good education, or can't get a good blue-collar job, which no longer exist. So they join the military and become cannon fodder. The war criminal Henry Kissinger once said soldiers were "stupid animals" to be used for political purposes. In a word, pawns.

Not only do the poor fight the wars, they get even poorer, and the rich get even richer. Money flows to war industries—and who owns them? The wealthy. They get even richer on tax payer money—your money, and mine, is transferred to them.

Those who fight the wars, being mental sleep-walkers, almost always think they are being patriotic. War-mongers don't think that way, being much more cynical and cowardly. George Washington Plunkitt, a hustler in New York City's notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall, said politics is invariably driven by graft and special interests, and lampooned patriotism and idealism as shams perpetuated by self-promoters. Cynical? I prefer the word "truthful."

Woodrow Wilson, who was an idealist and a high-IQ idiot, got the U.S. involved in WWI when the European combatants were ready to quit. Because of our involvement, Germany lost, and the "peace" treaty led directly to WW II, which was far more destructive than WWI. It was Wilson's misguided, idealistic crusade to "end all wars" that led to the horrors of the 20th Century.

For that matter the National Socialists (commonly called Nazis) and the International Socialists (commonly called Communists) were both idealists and patriots, and in the Battle of Stalingrad both sides lost more lives in one battle than America lost in all of its wars combined. Such are the wages of "idealism" and "patriotism."

Age and guile beat youth and a bad haircut every time, said the humorist P.J. O'Rourke. Guile's not a good thing. And with age should come wisdom... not cowardice, the kind that starts unnecessary wars, sends the young to die in them, and makes money off of mountains of corpses.

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