[Fenring]

Something along those lines. Average citizens can only loose, while war profiteers do their dirty work. Sometimes those are the same people that create current politics, or more often have great influence over political decisions being made, with virtually zero public profile.

For instance in 1991. when war in Croatia broke out, a lot of monetary resources from within country as well as many donations from expatriates were used to buy weapons in spite of the embargo. In fact, thanks to the embargo, the state had to rely on weapon smugglers for procurement of weapons, and those are shady characters at best. Because all transactions were done secretly, there was a lot of headroom for profit on the side. In fact, there was so much headroom that when the volunteers came to the front, rifles and ammo were sold to them on site instead of receiving them for free as part of std. military equipment. To this day the general public is still in the dark as to where so much money disappeared while volunteers gave their saving and their lives on the front lines. Sadly we'll probably never know. Many of the responsible have either died by now, or have gone into self appointed exile, where the hand of law cannot reach them.

But that's just one facet of it. During the war the inner circle of the government used the current situation as an excuse to liquidate many industrial assets that Croatia had prior to break up of Yugoslavia. Many became wealthy virtually over night. I could go on, but it's too depressing.

Now, I'm not saying that anything as disgusting as this is happening in the US, but there's no denying that the US possesses a great war industrial complex with many jobs done for military outsourced to civilian contractors, and that, at least in some part, keeps the economy going. It's a kind of legitimized war profiteering, but with profits being shared more widely into the system, with average citizen benefiting as well. Also, one doesn't have to be particularly cunning to notice that most military actions conducted by US, Russia and other players, in the last 50+ years, can be characterized as moves to secure various resources and strategic interests, which eventually translate to resources. National pride is then used to sway public opinion into support of one's government's actions. Even the wisest have fallen for that one, because when politicians play the emotional cards, national pride is an ace.