[grandpa]

How much does war beget war? Let's look at some fairly well-known results from WWII (many directly related).

Michael E. Kreca (a financial reporter
for Business Week, Knight-Ridder and the Financial Times of London):

...we certainly crushed Japan militarily, finally finishing the job with two atomic bombs in August 1945. What did we get for it all? Scores of GIs killed from Oahu to Okinawa, billions of postwar taxpayer dollars spent rebuilding a completely wrecked and humiliated Japan, keeping it militarily weak in the face of an appallingly genocidal and increasingly assertive Red China with both nations eventually becoming the USA's fiercest foreign economic competitors. Barely eight years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USA wound up with some 33,000 US dead in a still divided and tense Korea, and some two decades after that, 58,000 troops killed in a still Communist Indochina--the last courtesy of a fruitless eight-year conflict (which some have called the US version of the Boer War) that severely damaged US social, economic and political institutions. We then were treated to Pol Pot's notoriously barbaric Cambodian "Killing Fields," scads of desperate Vietnamese "boat people," thousands of US troops and a string of warships permanently deployed in the Far East, and, finally, Chinese Long March ICBMs aimed at the US West Coast.

Another interesting thing:

The Northern Marianas, conquered from Japan during World War II, became a U.N. Trust Territory in 1947. In 1976, its inhabitants voted by a three-to-one margin to become a self- governing commonwealth of the United States whose inhabitants gained U.S. citizenship 10 years later. The United Nations ended its trusteeship of the territory in 1990. To help spur economic growth on the islands, Congress agreed to exempt the CNMI from federal minimum wage and immigration laws. In the mid-1980s, the Mariana's government extended an open invitation to foreign apparel manufacturers, eager to take advantage of a ''Made in the USA'' label, to set up shop in CNMI.

However....

President Bill Clinton's administration, and key U.S. lawmakers [eventually] launched a major effort to retake control of labour, immigration, and trade policies from the Northern Mariana Islands, a Pacific territory given quasi- independent status 22 years ago. The territory, located about 1000 kms east of China, currently hosts some 30 Asian-owned apparel factories employing as many as 37,000 workers from China, Bangladesh and the Philippines - lured to the territory, denied their human rights, and forced into what amounts to involuntary servitude, according to U.S. officials... ...''If these conditions existed in any of our states, we would not tolerate it for one day,'' according to Rep. George Miller, a Democrat, who released a report on the situation in the Commonwealth last week . He said the report ''documents an Orwellian nightmare of indentured and destitute labour, of entrapped and abandoned workers, of forced prostitution and coerced abortions, of government corruption, of denials of basic labour and religious rights.''

U.S. Moves to Reassert Control of Pacific Territory - misc.activism.progressive | Google Groups

Personally, it seems that war and foreign political control easily creates chaos in any society.
What do you think?

Grandpa h.