On Fri, 02 Jan 2004 22:25:13 -0000, Earl Colby Pottinger
wrote:



Things I have learnt:

1) There are people to this day don't seem to understand that Americans are
not cowards, they just don't like to fight wars. **** they off and they will
fight, they will not be scared off, rather they will hit you with everything
they have got. Why people think otherwise that is beyond me.

Me neither. I can see why some people might think that as a nation we
are not too bright or perhaps easily manipulated, but we certainly
seem to be willing to fight.


2) There are people to this day who think they can make a war too big to
fight. America is BIG, it really is BIG, I mean really, really BIG. When
America goes to war, it does not gear up production to fight, instead it uses
the war to clean out all the old stock it has lying around to make room for
new shiny weapons that it will make later after examining the results of the
old weapons. By the way America hate holding onto old stock, it does not
matter how little you are, they want to use all thier old stock on you to
clean out the inventory. I guess it make the paperwork easyier.


3) There are people to this day who think they can make a war too expensive.
America is rich, it probably is the only country where government people say
"A billion here, a billion there, soon it starts to add up to real money' and
mean it. In other words if you spend a billion dollars making your defense
system, America can afford to spend ten billion tearing it down. Ditto, if
you spent 10 billion.

Tell me something, do you like throwing the nation's money away? I
gather we spent about $60B fighting the Iraq war, and are planning to
spend another $80B or so on "reconstruction". "Reconstruction" is
apparently not reconstructing very much at the moment (almost no power
in Iraq, water shortages, etc. from an article I recently read) -
despite a very large budget. Oddly enough, Iraq did a much faster job
of reconstruction all by itself without US help after the Gulf war.
Go figure.

What are we actually getting for our money? Do you think that the US
gvt is going to find the mysteriously missing weapons of mass
destruction?

Apparently you don't want to set any limit into how much money the US
will throw away.

The recent trend to mindless militarism in the US frankly alarms me.

If we were actually getting something from it as a nation, it might be
understandable (though not particularly ethical, a sort of "big fish
eats little fish might makes right" sort of ethics). But we're not
even getting anything from it (as a nation, I mean, I'm sure a few
rich people are getting very much richer).