Nearly a Trillion Reasons to Hate War

At a glance I've come up with a low estimate of 7, 282,000,000 reasons to despise war and the money spent on it.

A flag draped over a coffin, another soldier is dead...We've got our marching orders...We've crossed too many borders, military suicide...War killing sons and daughters, another failed attack...Politicians confuse me, I watch the body count rise, why are the children all marching into the desert to die?

Those are singer Ozzy Osbourne's lyrics from his song "Black Rain" released in May, 2007.

My thoughts and condolences go out the family and friends of the more than 6,700 U.S. soldiers that have lost their lives since the Afghan and Iraq, wars began in 2001 and 2003. The website icausaties.org confirms these sad facts.

Certain billionaires are profiting from war, business as usual. When you have no soul, conscience and are driven purely on greed and power, the deaths of tens of thousands of young men and women vastly aged between 19 and 24-years-old mean absolutely nothing. After all, these business demons are not entering combat themselves and are not sending their own children to die while making huge amounts of money in the war business.  

 In 2010 the U.S. spent nearly $700 billion on its military. Journalist Howard Steven Friedman's November, 2011 article "Five Countries With the Highest Military Expenditure" on the web; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/military-spending-united-states_b_1118851.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/military-spending-united-states_b_1118851.html clarifies these facts.

Friedman's article states that the U.S. spends more money on its military than China, the U.K., France and Russia combined. Incidentally these four countries rank 2-5 in military spending retrospectively and the U.S. spent six times the amount on its military then number two China. President Donald Trump still wants to increase our military, it's ludricrious. 

With the money spent on war, a low estimate of 21 million Americans could have graduated four year colleges for free. Obviously no government believes that 'knowledge is power.'

In all my reference checks between 50,000 and more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Vietnam War and at least two-million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians including women and children died while American soldiers were there. Some politicians to this day call that war, the Vietnam Conflict. Wow, my idea of a conflict is when a man's wife wants to see "Machete Kills Again" and the man wants to see "Love Begets Flowers" while standing in a box office line.

How about war crimes that result in brutal raping, pillaging and murder of civilians that get washed away in red tape? The few war crimes that get reported seem to yield very little or no punishment for those involved. The very day I turned 4-years-old in March of 1968, U.S. soldiers under the order of Lt. William L. Calley Jr massacred an estimated 500 unarmed men, women and children in the town of My Lai, South Vietnam.

 The New York Times nearly 50 year-old article; "U.S. Soldiers Massacre Vietnamese Civilians at My Lai" on the web; http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/march-16-1968-u-s-soldiers-massacre-vietnamese-civilians-at-my-lai/ states bodies were mutilated and young women raped. Calley Jr was sentenced to just three and a half years of house arrest for these horrific crimes and no one else involved received any punishment.

Currently in Operation Dessert Freedom (war), many middle eastern civilians are being killed for no reason other than the fact some U.S soldiers are ruthless murderers.

Drop Weapons are something mainstream news remains hush about.

Drop Weapons in a nutshell are a legal way for U.S. soldiers to kill unarmed middle eastern civilians. The article "Soldiers Discuss Using Drop Weapons To Cover Up Killing Innocent Iraqi Civilians" details how some U.S. military personal carry spare weapons for the sole purpose of planting them near Iraqi and Afghan civilians once they have murdered them. This article can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/02/soldiers-discuss-using-dr_n_104682.html.

While I'm on the subject of civilian war casualties, there is of course the ending of World War II in which the U.S. government decimated at least 220,000 people, (mostly civilians) in a three day span with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Now the big concern, at least in many of today's headlines; North Korea and the countries quest for weapons of mass destruction. I personally am not concerned about North Korea, or its leader Kim Wong Un.

I adhere to what Bill Maher recently said on one of this year’s programs, "Real Time with Bill Maher.” Maher claims Jong Un is 28-years-old and has two children with two different women. Maher's point of Jong Un not wanting to world to end is a good one.

I'd like to add that Jong Un like his deceased father was is an avid NBA fan. The NBA finals don't start until June 6 and won’t end until June 13 or 20. Then the 2013-2014 NBA season starts in November. Unless there is an indefinite NBA strike, I say North Korea is not a threat.

Kooks with nukes in the middle east? Now I have at least 7, 282,000,001 reasons to hate war.