What is it good for?
It kept Eric Burden off the streets…
Absolutely Nuttin’, say it again! Huuuuh!
The overwhelming majority of people have more than the average (mean) number of legs. – E. Grebenik
Hey, don’t knock it. Kept me gainfully employed for twenty years. Like Joker said in * Full Metal Jacket *, I got a chance to visit interesting places, learn fascinating cultures, interact with the native peoples of faraway places…and kill them. 
“…send lawyers, guns, and money…”
Warren ZevonIsn’t that a Tolstoy line?..hahahahaha…remember the Seinfeld episode about that?
Contestant #3
Apparently it’s good for keeping a non-sexual, inapproprtiate relationship off the front page of the morning newspaper.
Oh, come off it, LongHrn. That’s bullshit, and if you’d think about it for a moment, you would be capable of realizing it.
Waste
Flick Lives!
Can I intrude with a serious answer?
I doubt if our society would be anywhere close to its current level of technology if it wasn’t for war. Communications, medicine, aeronautics, food storage, etc. all owe a lot to advancements made during wartime.
Not to mention eliminating the occasional group of Europe-occupying, genocidal maniacs.
Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine
It was necessary for us to intervene in a several hundred year old civil war? We helped him complete his ethinic cleansing and we did a good thing?
Maybe we should help more people, I am sure the IRA would like our help.
Hey Bill got anything else you want to get out of the papers?
Jeffery
Uh, I was actually thinking about a slightly earlier group of Europe-occupying, genocidal maniacs. You know, the ones who actually declared war on us. You may have seen a movie or two about those guys.
I’ll agree that we botched up badly our handling of the latest set of Europe-occupying, genocidal maniacs.
Gl, I don’t trust my government. So I am entitled to my opinions, not that it matters, I was making a joke. I’m not going to put up with shit from you for making a joke. Get off my ass. If you believe that Clinton’s motives were pure, that’s your own delusional reality. But I’m not going to get into that, it has nothing to do with the OP. Once again, so as not to incur the wrath of the humor impaired, **I was making a joke.[b\]
LongHrn: Fair enough, you don’t trust your government, and fair enough, it’s your opinion. It’s also nonsense.
And I’m not on your ass. Simply pointing out that you are wrong. And I doubt that Smilin’ Bill’s motives were entirely pure, but to accuse him of going to war simply to keep his hummer out of the limelight is ludicrous.
Waste
Flick Lives!
[[The Crimson Hipster Dufuz]]
George? Is that you??
Rich
It can be a Hell of a good – or at least final – way of settling a dispute.
BTW, was, “Violence never settles anything” the motto of the city of Carthage, or of Timur-i-lenk?
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Gwynn Dyer, a Canadian journalist, made a documentary series called “War” about twenty years ago, in which he examined the process from training for it through to postwar settlements.
One of the themes was that wars, for good are bad, are inevitably reoccurring things that serve as a kind of social/geopolitical enema that relieves tension that’s constantly building up. They’re a forcible reorganization of the relationships between nations that get out of whack in peacetime as once-powerful nations decline and young nations grow.
“Existence defies essence.” - John Barth?
Good point, but I would trade CNN for a grandfather, two uncles and a handful of cousins any day.
I was hoping this thread would take a different direction, so let me interject.
WWI: 8,500,000
WWII: 45,000,000
Korea: 3,000,000
Vietnam: 2,500,000
59,000,000
In this century alone, in two great wars and two conflicts: 59,000,000 lives.
What is it good for?
45 million dead in WWII? Worth it? Would you rather see the Nazi swastika flying over Washington DC? Maybe war is just part of the human existence.
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Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men. *
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Coriolanus *, Act !V, Scene V
Shakespeare
“…send lawyers, guns, and money…”
Warren ZevonI stand by the Augustinian definition of a just war. If a war prevents more suffering than it causes, then it is a just war and should be fought.
hansel: Is that documentary available on video by any chance?
Waste
Flick Lives!