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? These are singer Ozzy Osbourne's lyrics from his song "Black Rain" released in May, 2007. In lull of the passing of the latest Memorial weekend, 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 Iraq / Afghanistan war began in 2003. The website icausaties.org confirms these sad facts. Few billionaires are profiting from war, business as usual. When you have no soul, conscience, driven purely on greed and power, what's tens of thousands of deaths of young men and women vastly aged between 19 and 24-years-old? After all these business demons are not entering combat themselves and are sending other parents  children to die, so they can add to their already enormous bank accounts. In 2010 alone 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 just mentioned are numbers two-five in military spending retrospectively and the U.S. spent six time the amount on its military then number two China.Without the money spent on war a low estimate of 21 million Americans could have graduated a four year college 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 the war crimes resulting 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.  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 also mutilated and young women raped. American tax dollars hard at work. Calley Jr was sentenced to three and a half years house arrest for these horrific crimes and no else involved received any punishment. Currently in the Operation Dessert Freedom which is really war many Middle Eastern civilians are being killed for no reason other than certain sadistic soldiers acquire pleasure in murder which is essentially legal. "Drop Weapons" are published once in the mainstream news so we can forget about current war crimes and watch lame TV or sporting events. 'Drop Weapons' in a nutshell is 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. 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 killed at least 220,000 people, (mostly civilians) a three day span with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now the big concern, at least in many of today's headlines is North Korea and their wanting 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 father is a huge fan of American basketball. The NBA finals don't start to June 6, and will at least go until June 16, and 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.