I agree. I think access to oil, leases, pipeline routes, etc. are real geostrategic concerns and potential sweeteners to push a war, but I don't think they are the 'reason' for these wars.

Add to the reasons you gave: Petroleum markets appear to loathe uncertainty and volatility above all else. Their denizens lose billions on fluctuations, not least because they disrupt time lines on new high-risk exploration projects, lease negotiations, financing, the acqquisition of partners to assume risk in field initiation, access to refinery facilities, downstream marketing lags, etc. (I know, poor oil companies!)

I think these wars are about exercising power, fundamentally. And I think the people who push them, the entire apparatus of them in all their complex interconnections, really believe they are doing something important and righteous. That is a lot scarier, to me, than the idea that it's 'blood for oil'. But it also seems to fit.

Thanks for the tip about advancing toilet bowl cleaning technology. My turn to clean the bathroom this week. :>

On corporate boondoggles that we must fund in order to keep from slipping from 1st to 1st-infinitesimal amount in techomilitary dominance, I give you the Future Combat System, also known as the Future Contractor System (link at sig is a good start).

Hilariously, they believed CIA disinformation that the USSR owned a terror network.

Well ... that one was actually true. Cadres were trained at Patrice Lumumba University, funds were provided for leftist groups like Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades, ETA, the Tupemaros, etc; funding for 'military' operations to PFLP-GC, Abu Nidal and others. Also, technical advisors arranged by KGB to set up drug trade to maintain 'sustainable' funding.

There have been a lot of academic books about this that have floated out since Gorbachev opened the archives.

I think you can probably get the PowerPoint, which is as close as it's going to get to reality (many billions later)...

I seem to be having a Javascript or Flash Player version problem (h/t error message), but I'll definitely check that vid out.

I guess you know I'm not trying to make a point that paints the US in any better light this way, or kicking the dead horse that is the USSR ...

LWM - Olmert? Which missing white woman is she? After all, it can't be breaking news ...

I'll see your breaking news and raise you this ... um, breakinger news (you thought that subj line was just a cheap attention-getter, didn't you?)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7390109.stm

I remember an academic article called "MAD vs. NUTS", which compared Mutually Assured Destruction to Nuclear Utilitaztion Theory Strategies (i.e., "No, we really CAN use those nukes and not end the world ... and here's how we'll do it!"). Predictably, all I remember is the title ...

the Nicaraguan tank divisions that were just days away from the Texas border...

Those were the ones filled with killer bees, right?

From the JP link I posted earlier:

Iran is suspected of having smuggled Ukrainian X-55 cruise missiles and using them as models for an independent, domestic project.

I don't know much about the Ukranian arms industry, so I couldn't say when such a thing was first produced, how easy it is to get one, or whether it's worth a damn. But it certainly goes to your point that the technology is more widespread that most people (including me, before reading this) probably think.

That was a truly excellent survey, I was smiling the whole way through. You'll have to do an amended version, to include some of the up and coming cranks you left out. Thanks again.

I'm on the road for much of today, and there's a lot on this thread I would love to comment on but won't be able to ... still, I wanted to write a quick note to thank you for that post. Fascinating. Thanks.

As a somewhat smaller benefit with more immediate application, you've also provided me some fuel for a long conversation with my brother in law, who is a pilot with great interest in such things, and whose birthday is today. So, thanks again!

Thanks very much for that wonderful post. Well said.

When this latest debacle was just warming up, I wondered aloud, in public meetings, book readings and college classrooms, whether we were ready to absorb the costs (in addition to the tangible ones) of an eroding moral fabric, the upticking trend of atrocities that always accompany such long and bitter fighting as it was easy to imagine (though easier to forget), the other moral contortions that we would inevitably find ourselves in as we denied, isolated, divided and hated.

My imagination was unequal to what has actually happened. Serious as the damages I could project were, they were nothing compared to what's happened. Still, people looked at me with skepticism and disbelief (on this point, anyway).

I wish you'd been there.