Wars the US waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan following September 11, 2001 caused at least 4.5 million deaths and displaced 38 to 60 million people, with 7.6 million children starving today, according to studies by Brown University.
Your argument would be very convenient for socialists or communists looking for an explanation that blames war on the rich. Unfortunately I do believe it is a gross oversimplification that is neither useful nor particularly true.
While it is true that the military industrial complex has gotten out of control in many western countries since World War II, the argument that private industry is the true beneficiary and intentional instigator of war can be readily disproved. Rather, this assumption made by many on the left is born from a partial realization of the truth that war is about resources, but the argument quickly loses the plot thereafter. War is indeed about resources, both physical and psychological in nature, or put more succinctly, war is about security. Each state actor responds and reacts as necessary in order to ensure their legitimate security needs are met.
This view was famously espoused by political scientist Kenneth Waltz when he built upon the theories of classic realists such as Machiavelli. Whereas Classic Realism suggests that war is about power, Waltz takes it one step further with Structural Realism and gives us an academic framework to understand the balance of power and the motivation behind state actors. Waltz suggests that these power shifts are the result of states reacting to perceived threats in order to ensure security. For instance, in the Structural Realist view, one could say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to gain security in response to a perceived NATO threat. Using this theory, we could similarly suggest that the US invasion of Afghanistan was a move to obtain greater security in a region that threatened the US hegemony (though the argument starts to break down here when we distinguish between the Taliban and Al Qaeda as neo-realism does not explain the action of non-state actors).
While it would be fair to say that in many western countries, the military industrial complex has acquired a massive amount of power and control over the government, it can hardly be said that war exists only for the benefit of war profiteers who help with nation building. The most obvious proof of this is the fact that war long pre-dates crony capitalism, nation building, and the military industrial complex as a whole. Furthermore, while lobbyists do hold an incredible amount of power, they are certainly not the rulers and final decision-makers of our country. Foreign policy is set by a number of diverse lawmakers and civil servants across the political landscape, but the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, which was opposed by the Military Industrial Complex, as well as the US intervention in Somalia which was wholly a humanitarian mission, are proof that they do not make the final decisions.
Our democracy certainly has many problems. Money pollutes our campaigns, and lobbyists hold far too much power. Trump’s five year lobbying ban for former US officials was a good start until he repealed it. We need more measures that limit lobbyists, and limit the ability of ANY politician or political party from totally derailing our country by putting us into unnecessary wars. We need more checks and balances in our system that prevent career politicians from fucking the rest of us over. And dammit, we definitely need to elect some better people than these jokers we’ve been electing lately. However; war is far more complex than you suggest.
War is not particularly complex, it’s just not something liberals are usually willing to understand as it challenges their little mythologies (many of which you repeated here).
Relatively simple questions are unanswerable by that framework, not even approximately. Let’s try some.
Who pushes for war in the first place? Where does the impetus come from? Normal folks don’t wake up and say, “yeah I’d like to destroy a country and its people 4500 miles away”, and they definitely don’t have the power to make war happen.
What gains the consent of the country to support and maintain war? Why do anti-war movements, even with millions of people, fail to stop war?
Why do the wars end? When they achieve their purpose? What purpose was that?
Who benefits from the wars? Are they involved in the process?
Of course, the driving factors here are simply capitalism and its political lackeys, attacking from multiple angles to ensure its seat of empire will achieve the desired ends by pushing and by removing obstacles. The impetus is a series of battling foreign policy think tanks, politicians ready to support military spending, a friendly (and racist!) media apparatus, and war profiting companies paying every single one of those groups to keep the heat up for the next boondoggle. Constant vilification of established “enemies” and attempts to create new ones, usually targeted at countries that undermine the power of the global seat of capital and therefore its ability to exploit labor and resources internationally.
This is why Saudi Arabia is an “ally” while Iran is an enemy. All things the same, Americans would be just as racist towards both, care just as little for their lives, know just as little about them. But one cozies up to the hegemony of international capital and the other does not, so you are to hate the one and not the other. Scads of anti-Iranian think tanks and propaganda while the Saudis get occasional mention and can even murder journalists on US soil and get away with it. It’s not actually that complex so long as you don’t believe lies about American democracy, “freedom”, interest in peace, liberal world order, etc.
So when we know that these are the actors and criteria, why some wars and not others? Why not big new wars every 6 months instead of several years? Well, the interests involved are part of global capital, they respond to the rate of profit and crises of capitalism, and politicians are on their side. Both the capitalists and their buddies in Congress know that war is a “stimulus” and they count it as jobs and profits and campaign donations (legalized bribery) and good press. The opportune time is whenever it can be sentimentally capitalized on, whenever they can get away with it. When it’s hurting the “right people” at the time, where they might have to wait for consent to get manufactured first. When times are tough and “jobs” mean particularly more than other people’s lives.
And more deeply and perniciously, capitalism forms society itself, such as the white supremacist settler culture of the United States where it is never that difficult to whip up support against another ethnicity, just requires jumping through a few different hoops depending in which capitalist party you favor. The intense gullibility and susceptibility to propaganda, in part due to schools’ materials being dictated by reactionary school systems that themselves work in concert with large publishers to create verifiably false and simplistic material into history textbooks, lesson plans, etc (see: Texas’ input on other states’ curricula). The precarity forced on so many that they can’t even consider joining an anti-war movement. The normalization of American military violence and widespread societal myths about its impact, its actual activities, its history.
I don’t think any of this is complicated. It is only uncomfortable for some.