You know, I realize large-scale war and conflict will never end, despite Gene Roddenberry's fantastic writings to the contrary (then again, Gene was obviously never too sure of that - wars on Earth may have ended, but only because puny humans made it to space and found all kinds of new, exciting other species to fight!). And I know about the hypothesis that any time there are more young men than women in a society, there's more likely to be war waged. It doesn't make me understand any better, though, the
sheer wastefulness of fighting a war for the sake of fighting it. I know this administration still hopes to plunder and ransack Iraqi resources like the cutthroat pirates they are, but so far, the only entities I see making a profit out of this are Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, and other contractor Bush-Cheney-buddies. It's not like they're going to get all these barrels of oil - insurgents have been setting fire to pipelines and supplies for four years (I don't really blame them; I'd burn my new house down before I'd let some asshole illegally take it for himself, if I knew I couldn't get it back in short order).
( Wherein I may display simplistic ignorance, but by God, at least I've kept up enough to know some of it is ignorance )