I could be wrong about this and, if I am, Gogolplex will certainly set it right, but it seems to me that these United States of America have been at war for my entire lifetime.
That would take us back to 1943 - World War Two, the Greatest Generation and the hundred and seventy five movies that followed it and glorified our part in it. Then came the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, the Second Gulf War and Afghanistan. Lest we forget, our troops also fought in Somalia, Lebanon, Haiti, Kosovo, Grenada, Cuba and El Salvador during this period, although some would dispute these as "not wars" and others would argue other fine points.
Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that we have become a Warrior Nation, replacing the Brits, the Germans, the Romans, the Egyptians and even Genghis Khan himself. We are it, Baby. The nastiest bastards in the playpen.
Without this unchallenged record of carnage, would we have the standard of living we – at least some of us - now enjoy? Without Boeing, Dow, Blackstone, Lockheed, DuPont, and the entire military/industrial complex we have built, could we have political correctness, arugula, and vegetarians?
We are truly steeped in blood, brothers.
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What could possibly constitute a good metric for your proposition? The total number killed on both (more generally, 'all') sides in acts of 'war'? The amount of luchre expended, corrected for inflation? Percent of time a nation is at conflict with other nations, involving casualties through the use of weaponry? The total number of distinct 'conflicts' (the Hundred Year War would fall at one end of that spectrum) between one nation and a permutation of others?
ReplyDeleteOne might argue that the brief time span under consideration is too limiting to be of statistical significance...but if that is the window, we might well have won the dubious prize through a combination of the surrogate measures we just posited. And we are on record to boot for the first and only (make it so, goddess!) use of an actual WMD (two, Fat Man and Little Boy).
To your last paragraph, contrast the Swiss -- who have chocolate in addition to vegetarians (check out the Hiltl next time you're in Zurich), PC and arugula -- with other contenders for the prize like the Yanomamo, quite possibly the most warlike people on earth, who have none of the above but lots of head injuries from ritual head-bashing contests with mallets:
http://www.eclectica.org/v11n2/hamilton.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya̧nomamö
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/projects/axfight/updates/biellaintroduction.html
Until then, mark me as being on the Chocolate Soldier's side in Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man." And please pass the theobromine-laced truffles:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Arms_and_the_Man_(Shaw)