Perhaps this is an issue that the government is ultimately prepared to concede, but only after it has acted as a lightning rod for public discontent. Meanwhile more important (to TPTB) decisions get made under a reduced public gaze. This could be similar to the way in which some people think that Tony Blair used the fox-hunting issue as a distraction around the time of the Iraq war.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed197.html

Excerpt:
"And of course we are herd animals with a formidable tendency to attach ourselves to groups – it doesn’t much matter what groups – and fight other groups. Thus football teams, bowling clubs, political parties, and wars. Patriotism is exactly the instinct that makes people cheer frantically for the Steelers against the Packers, and armies are just Crips and Bloods with more elaborate switch-blades.

All of this I suppose explains why so many are either flatly uninterested in the war or, à la Fox, very interested but without knowing anything about it – where it is, who is fighting whom and why, how the place got that way. Emotionally it is the Bulls vs. the Lakers. Intellectually it is an empty jar.

And yet it remains, or seems to remain, that the public, almost all of it, has not the slightest grasp of the war – and, by easy extension, of anything else outside the borders. When I listen to Bill O’Reilly, I want to hold up a placard behind him, asking his audience: Where is Yemen? What is the capital? Have you read a single book on Afghanistan? Read any book on anything? Heard of Eric Margolis? Can you distinguish Sunnis from Albigensians?"

Add to the general ignorance, the much more dangerous ignorance of what animates our societies; i.e. the monetary system.

Starting wars is easier than you might think

This is the thing. What is afflicting our monetary system today is our inability to expand credit markets. Ergo we have lost the ability to induce that type of inflation that results in a general rise in prices that in turn result in a nominal rise in fiscal revenue. Today you are witnessing inflation in commodities which in fact act as a tax on consumers thus negating a general rise in prices (the creator of the currency can create more currency but cannot decide where it is spent – most economic actors are trapped in debt so that more money made available does not result in consumers making use of it in the wider economy – it instead is used by investors to hedge against the debasement of the currency and by emerging market producers). Rising commodity prices also curtail the purchasing power of emerging economies more severely because developing societies allocate a much higher percentage of income to food than we do in the West.

So, in an economy predicated on consumption, rising commodity prices result in reduced GDP thus reduced fiscal revenue.

The whole thing is made worse by low industrial capacity utilization (diminished pricing power) and by my pet peeve, diminishing marginal utility of debt.

Put it all together and what you begin to see is that regardless of where the war starts and for what reason (we are not short of potential triggers: from Venezuela to North Korea via Iran we have plenty of sacrificial lambs we can throw out the window) the next war must be taken to a geographic area that roughly snakes from India, through China to South Korea and/or Japan.

… I can hear you think "WTF!"… 🙂

You see. Bringing industrial capacity back to the West today would do little to solve our predicament because we already have sooooooo much industrial capacity globally that building even more capacity on our shores will collapse everyone's pricing power.

So what is the next best thing you can do?

You have to somehow reduce everyone else's industrial capacity. And while you are at it, wipe out significant chunks of infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, power lines, ships, ports…) so that after the war is done, we can start lending some more fiat money for the reconstruction.

… and Bob's your proverbial uncle… the health of the debt based fiat monetary system is restored… if only temporarily….

I hope that if the US is stupid enough to try to manufacture yet another war in the mid east, that it will only result in a catalyst for people all around the world and in the US to say ENOUGH!

Expatriate experts and diplomats by and large are thoroughly out of touch with reality not only in the geographic area where they happen to be posted but also at home. Common folk too, be they foreigners or locals, have a hard time making the part of things but generally speaking, they firmly believe what they read in the main stream press… and most truly believe there are foreign evil forces at work to destroy "our way of life". Even those whom purport to be well informed and capable of objective critical thought feel they are well informed because they consult a wide variety of sources. The thought that the main stream press may not be a reliable source of information does not even picture as a remote possibility.

This is all to say that the majority of Western population can easily be swayed to take action against some hapless sod in some faraway land whom, incidentally, can also be blamed for the misfortune that has befallen us. Because they hate us for our quality of life.

I will hope for your outcome to materialize but am preparing for what I think the outcome will be.

People at the turn of the last century found it hard to believe another great war would be possible. The industrial revolution was then just beginning. Steam and electricity were revolutionizing every day life. Biology and chemistry were making medicine more effective. All the sciences were making great strides and Darwin's theory was keeping people busy to refute his findings or mesmerized in wonder.
War was furthest from people's mind.

Anyway. The observer effect ensures that things will happen exactly because they are unexpected and nobody is looking at the issues that lead up to a particular outcome.

Also, when you think of global war, it helps if you disregard the reasons for hostility towards another nation. This coming war like many before it, is a war of expedience.

When large swathes of Western society will be in quick succession unemployed, homeless and then hungry and when, at the same time, the governing elites will be caught red handed in scandal upon scandal as it is happening, it will not take much to coalesce the social unhappiness of people in different countries into a revolution. Notice in this regard what is happening in developing nations.

But Western leaders cannot let revolution happen in the West. If they allowed revolution to happen in the West, in one fell swoop we would be proved to be no more righteous or moral than your garden variety Moubarak or Mugabe.

So, before any revolution will take hold in the West, our leaders will create a diversion and pack us off to the front.

This is what it looks like from where I am standing.

Debt based fiat money logic dictates that the efficiency of the currency wanes over time till it loses all effectiveness on the wider economy. We are there today. But whereas in 1929 it was only America that had reached the limits of monetary policy and in 1971 it was only the West, today monetary policy has lost traction globally.

there have already been anecdotal instances of retribution taken out on bankers and politicians in, for example, Alabama. I reported on a few cases on my blog.

The thing is that as soon as this type of action becomes more common and spreads, that will be the signal for the authorities to create a diversion that, this time around, will be a global conflict in my opinion. But it is MY opinion … which is worth exactly what you are paying for it… but that is the logical ramification of deliberate currency debasement (debt based fiat money will always and everywhere debase the currency).

@ Ben Gabel
Western currencies and most other currencies today are Dollar based and draw their worth from a system of floating exchange rates. This is a fancy term meaning that each sovereign pledges to buy other sovereigns debt.
For all intents and purposes, the floating exchange rate dynamic is now broken seeing that all Western sovereigns are unable to spare any money once they are done monetizing their own sovereign debt (quantitative easing).
So now, any floating exchange rate action that is going on is necessarily carried out via convoluted and very opaque transactions (i.e. swap lines) and inherently involves more QE ergo more artificial credit creation. Things are so opaque in fact that entities like the Fed as of last week successfully maneuvered to have new legislation passed whereby any losses won't appear on their books.
Anyway. All that is to say that at the end of the line, the creator of the currency must co-opt its allies to give the appearance of viability. Hence other than having the Primary Dealers buy their own country's sovereign debt and quickly turn around to sell it back to the Fed, the USA also needs the UK and other countries to keep the gig going as long as possible…
But it is a gig… and we are at the end of it… we are horribly close to the final denouement and, from where I am standing, it looks ever more like a war somewhere that will employ our jobless and our homeless and our hungry as cannon fodder…
It's been done before… it will be done again…

the US has been playing the too big to fail game since reagan and been getting away with it

where do you think the banks got the idea from

We have bought WHAT? Our sickly cut-stricken country just bought WHAT? Half a trillion dollars of US-govt debt???

Have they no idea how worthless that paper is? Its almost certainly the now-proven-empty MBS sold to them by the banks..

Let me get this straight ala Golem:
The banks are insolvent and trade their worthless paper for nice shiny new QE dollars with the US govt.

Who now turn around and sell the worthless paper to the british people for their solid pounds. The british govt are then short of cash and cut everything to the bone & raise taxes.

Eventually the worthless paper is taken to the market to sell it and all of a sudden mark-to-imagination is replaced by mark-to-market reality. Worthless paper turns out to be, well, worthless.

Guess who has lost out? Not the banks that's for sure.

They are laughing at us. May they laugh all the way to their eternal damnation.

The truth is, the USA is now playing 'too-big-to-fail' in the same way the banks have been.