General Smedley Butler, a former USMC Commandant who was twice awarded the Medal of Honor said, “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes . . .

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

In more modern times, we’ve moved war beyond the “racket” stage and into a habit.

It doesn’t matter if I think the current Iraq war is justified – if I had achieved the signature goal and was able to continue campaigning, it would not have been up to me to decide at which target or if I would have deployed our military. I think that there were reasons to have animosity against Iraq, especially in the Bush administration, but I think that if the decision had been legally and rightly up to me, I would have done things differently.

It has been said time and time again that you have to let the generals of a country play war with their army at least once every 7-10 years, not in training exercises, but for real, or the military minded leaders begin to get antsy and they start looking for trouble where it doesn’t really exist. I think that is a sad reason to go to war (to maintain readiness) and a sad way to begin to move away from war as a solution to political problems. But I also know that it is a very real situation, and that the military leadership can be very persuasive when they want to be.

That is why the power to declare war rests on the representative Congress. Congress, working properly, only declares war when the citizens accept and agree that war is the right and proper way to do things. The President only commands military attacks after the declaration of war is made. We should not have the ability to grant the Executive the power to begin military campaigns without a formal declaration of war against an identified enemy. And if we do not have an enemy we can identify, we should not be allowed to launch full-scale military campaigns at all.

So no, I don’t think the actions of 9-11 justify full-scale war in a situation where we cannot even identify the enemy. I also don’t think that we have the right to continue to fight in a manner that is supposed to create something for the people who aren’t willing to fight in mass for those changes – it is impossible to achieve that goal. Sure, even during our revolution, only about 30% of the people actually wanted to split from England. But the majority of the rest were not against it, they were just unwilling to be involved. And the 30% that saw the value were willing to fight as a group, to take up arms and to die, to assure the sovereignty and freedom of the citizens. Only when you have that kind of action in a nation can you lend help with some reasonable expectation of success.

But it would not be my call – I would not have been elected as a person to abdicate responsibility and decisions to. It would be the call of the people. But one thing I know for sure. If we were going to war to retaliate against actions taken against our country and to insure that such actions would be far less likely to reoccur, then the war would have been prosecuted to it’s fullest, the ‘enemy’ decimated, and the world would have known that we as a nation were not people who would sit by and do a half-assed job dealing with those who would threaten us. It would not be a humanitarian war, it would not be a war we started for the liberation of another nation’s citizens. It would have been a full-on, every reasonable weapon and tactic desployed reign of destruction. fully funded. Because there is no other reasonable outcome when you go somewhere else to retailiate against a large-scale attack on our country.

War is not civil, it cannot be made so. War in that part of the world cannot be waged on a person-by-person basis. So if we are there, or if we find justification to be anywhere else, we need to stop playing around and get the job done, save the lives of our own, make sure that those who threaten us cannot do so again (hey, they have already proven that they are willing to kill us or we would not be there, so what is holding us back?) and get the life and livelihoods of our citizens back to normal as fast as possible. That is the requirement the government must have for defending the nation, not some trumped-up humanitarian cause.