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by forshaper 23 days ago
There hasn't been a clear goal for an American war since the first Gulf War.
3 comments

The goals for intervention in the Serbia/Bosnia conflict were clear and noble, IMO.
That wasn't an American operation though, that was a NATO and UN operation involving American, British, French and Dutch forces.
I considered that closer to truly multi-national, but we might as well take the win.
I'm not sure its accurate to imply that being completely delusional means you have no goal. Gulf War part II had a goal regardless of the deceit involved. The Afghanistan war though I thought took the cake for the sheer delusional premise.

To tie it to the sibling comment about Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown who was the High Representative for Bosina & Herzegovina was also one of the lone voices warning about the Afghanistan war in the beginning.

I wasn't able to find the article containing the original warnings, but here is one article from the early days[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/11/britainand9...

clear goal is making trillions to war profiteer friends, is this too hard to see for the public?
The public loves that narrative but it collapses under scrutiny.
The military industrial complex is a "narrative"? If anything the public does not understand it enough. But please, do scrutinize it. What is the goal of all of the USAs wars in the middle east, if not to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of shareholders of weapons companies? The latest one for example, in Iran, is clearly just because Trump can profit off of it, and because Israel wants to destroy all of their enemies in the region. And of course, Israel is a great consumer of USAs military technology (which they buy with "aid" i.e. taxpayer money from USA itself).
Just to be clear what your position is. You believe that US is getting involved in wars particularly the middle east because US government wants to give money directly to military contractors or it wants to boost the value of these weapons companies to benefit the people who invested.
If they just wrote the owners of the weapons companies a check directly, the public wouldn't like that as much as the "patriotic" "war on terror". But of course there's also other reasons such as religious fundamentalism (christian zionism) that influence it.
They do write weapons companies direct checks through research and procurement contracts. No one cares because the amount is tiny. Its not this huge market being pumped like slopulists pretend it is. Politicians dont need to invest in defense companies to get rich they can invest in anything with their insider knowledge. Defense companies dont need a war to get government money.