Posted on 11/13/2014 7:30:55 AM PST by Eric Pode of Croydon
This post appears in a combox on National Review's website. It is so good, so thorough, that I could not help but want to share it with FR.
1) Don't start a war you don't intend to finish.
2) Don't dream it's possible to start a war and have it go anywhere productive without lots of civilian deaths.
3) Don't buy into Keynes's theory that war is good for the economy. On all his big ideas, including this one, history has proven Keynes wrong.
4) The bump in political popularity a president gets at the beginning of a war is smaller than the drop he gets when the voters remember that, oh yeah, war is hell.
5) If you remove a dictator, you must become a dictator, lest a new dictator rises up in place of the old one.
6) Once you become a dictator in a foreign nation, you must plan on remaining one for a generation or so.
7) There are no allies we can safely arm in a country full of savages. Either we're in or we're out.
8) Destabilized regions are playgrounds for the most brutal and ruthless kind of people. If you destabilize a place, you are responsible for making it stable again, and that will almost certainly require you to do things that will result in the deaths of civilians.
9) The men of America's armed forces are as skilled and disciplined as ever, but the contractors who follow them into combat are creatures of government who are every bit as skeezy as the folks in Washington.
10) National defense should only be used to defend the nation from foreign threats, but when it's used, it must be used with overwhelming destructive force. A few drone strikes here and there accomplish nothing other than to make people hate us.
Interesting.
No mention of getting a declaration of war from congress...
The first rule of war is there are no rules.............
Another rule is: avoid any nation building. Let the enemy country pay for their own reconstruction so they realize the cost of dealing with the USA in war.
Really??
I was around before, during and of course after WW2.
This country boomed after we won WW2.
I would say economically this country became an International powerhouse because of us winning WW2 - Tom
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