From time spent arguing with an interventionist on a web forum

H______, in my last post I wasn't so much positing a moral case as trying to reiterate the plain and obvious fact that post-industrial America is a nation so hooked on war and its concomitant military-industrial complex that we are now disastrously dependent on military spending. You yourself demonstrate that Americans are quite ideologically habituated to war-making in the extreme, with an accompanying de-emphasis on conducting diplomacy and other forms of conflict-resolution in the world arena. Your praise of the Bosnian intervention is a case in point. You manifest a knee-jerk assumption that it was America's "God-given" duty to impose our will in the former Yugoslavia. You appear to be a passionate practicioner of Manifest Destiny, come hell, high water or national insolvency. Really, such an attitude has as its logical outcome a moral imperative to get involved militarily everywhere from Nepal to Sri Lanka, Congo and Colombia; as a practical matter, we just can't afford to do that. I think we needed to stay out of Bosnia, and focus on promoting the relative economic prosperity of the Clinton era. A relative prosperity that you know as well as I was shortly squandered on an insane $3 trillion+ war of corporate greed in Iraq. If the situation in the Balkans was as dire as you assert (and I believe it was, though of course the Serbs weren't the sole transgressors), then the European community should have dealt with it, not the US. After all, the Bosnia conflict fell decisively in their geographic domain, and Germany had the money to bankroll any supposedly necessary intervention. USA was preoccupied at the time with Iraq, where we had imposed a no-fly zone and criminally brutal sanctions that resulted in the death of 500,000 children. And where, to bring us back to the use of chemical weapons, we had already utilized only god knows how much Depleted Uranium weaponry. Some estimates are that the USA had already spent a colossal TEN TRILLION DOLLARS on the Pentagon's largess by 1985. Our addiction to throwing away incalculable amounts of money on belligerent activities world-wide is one certain way among many to effectively destroy our civilian economy. And we have pretty much done just that by our preposterous habit of sticking our noses where they don't belong planet-wide, and wasting vast amounts of blood and treasure. But my moral case centers mainly around my firm conviction Americans, yourself included to a significant extent, are mindlessly enamored of the idea that "American Exceptionalism" requires us to perpetually shoulder the unreasonable imperialist burden of intervening practically everywhere there is a civil war, humanitarian crisis, or perceived need to secure vital US interests. That attitude has cost millions of lives and whatever fiscal stability we as a country could ever hope for. Just heard the other day our national debt has passed the $17 trillion mark; if you and yours want to strike Syria so urgently, how about finding a way to pay for it yourselves, rather than getting us even further in hock to Beijing? Anyway, it seems that you've gotten your wish granted already, partially at least, as the Pentagon is now sending additional materiel to the Syrian rebels, a grouping which includes any number of murderers, cannibals and other human rights abusers. What sort of Blowback do you suppose we're in for, now that we've sent guns and money to "Al Qaeda in Syria?"