[ExI] future of warfare again, was: RE: Forking

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Mon Jan 2 18:37:02 UTC 2012


On 2 January 2012 19:02, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> I don't know the source, but I have heard that the cost of
> occupying Iraq exceeds a million dollars per man year.  We have all this
> money and all this treasure invested in that occupation.  What did we get
> for all that?  The Iraq occupation may be used in the future as a
> historical
> guide to why occupation is a bad idea.
>

This is OTOH a very old Maoist (and Swiss!) strategic theory. As long as
you are determined to resist, unless you are exterminated to the last man,
occupation is bound sooner of later to become economically unsustainable
for the occupant.

But speaking of the Iraqi adventure, let us accept for the sake of
discussion the ideological tenets of Wolfovitz & Co.: the American Empire
should strive for World Dominance to accomplish its Manifest Destiny, and
in order to do that they must secure the control of critical resources,
namely energy, bla-bla.

Now, I understand that the US spent 800 or 1000 billion dollars altogether
in order to reach a rather instable solution regarding a few spare oil
wells formerly in the hand of Saddam Hussein.

In the meantime, it took a consortium of 10 countries to put together a
scant 10 billion in order to slowly build ITER in the South of France.

One wonders, isn't that incredibly myopic for a would-be planetary empire
when being the first to control viable industrial production of fusion
energy would have guaranteed it a competitive edge on any conceivable
competitors for decades or perhaps centuries?

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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