Thoughts on Debt and War from Nine Years ago

Bob Moriarty
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Sep 18, 2025

For many years I dreamed of being a successful writer. While in Vietnam for twenty months I flew eight different aircraft. The only mission I never flew was dropping an atomic weapon so I understood a lot about the use of aircraft in war.

I didn’t write the definitive book about aviation in Vietnam for two reasons. One was simple and unexpected for many people. I am a rotten speller. Truly, if I had to type an entire page on a typewriter and you read it, you might conclude I’m actually an idiot. You may conclude that anyway.

But more importantly, the second reason for not writing was because I think it is a mistake to glorify war. War is ugly. Too many books try to make it look heroic. It’s not. The Vietnamese people simply wanted to rule themselves. That seems fair to me. They were the toughest soldiers and bravest I have ever known. So, my memories were stuck in my brain by themselves.

Until Putin spoke in the UN in late 2015. Addressing the US he asked a simple question. “Do you realize what you have done?” That moved me. It was the question every American should be asking constantly when thinking about all the insane wars the US engages in. “Do you realize what you have done?”

That prompted me to write an autobiography about war and how I participated from being an eighteen-year-old kid entering Navy flight training to my thoughts on war and debt in general. The book is titled The Art of Peace and available on Amazon and Lulu.

What follows is the last three pages of the book. Given that it was written nine years ago frankly I find it brilliant and timely even if I wrote it myself.

Wars benefit the few and cost the many. Since 2001 the US has fought in Iraq, in a shadow war in Iran, and in further wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Pakistan. We have CIA armed forces in dozens of other countries. None of these wars benefits America or Americans. Some, such as the second Iraq war, were simply made up out of whole cloth. While Hussein was a jerk, he was our jerk and no threat to anyone. We went in, destroyed his army and economy and started a religious war that seems without end. Between Iraq and Afghanistan, we have destroyed the financial structure of the world and the consequences will be more obvious with each passing day.

While peace is a desirable alternative any time at all, the absence of war is always a good idea. The world is closer to a nuclear WW III now than at any time in my lifespan. The US, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia all believe they can run Syria better than the Syrians. If a free election were held tomorrow, Assad would remain as president. He’s as big a thug as anyone else in a neighborhood of countries run by thugs. Democracy is one of those terms US politicians love to bandy about when running for election but become uncomfortable with when Gaza or Syria votes for opponents of Israel.

Russia has interests in Syria. Russia has always hankered for warm water ports, which is why Crimea is so important to them. The USSR and later Russia have maintained access to the port of Tartus in Syria since 1971. The US, Great Britain and France of course have no strategic or political interests in Syria. It’s a testament to the power of the Zionist lobby that those countries have chosen to support and arm terrorists in order to over throw the government of Assad.

There is no civil war in Syria. There are bands of terrorists supported by a variety of outside interests fighting over the corpse of the country in the same way that the western powers destroyed Libya. If Russia were to allow a similar debacle in Syria the result would be the same.

Israel has always been a giant fan of disorder in the Middle East, believing that it gains power if all of its neighbors descend into chaos. But the law of unintended consequences says that breaking things always makes things worse. Some 43 per cent of all Syrians have been displaced by the conflict. Refugees from the fighting in Iraq and Syria are pouring into Europe and threaten to destroy the entire concept of a European Union.

Between the chaos in the Middle East and the continuing slow motion train wreck of the world’s financial system, our world is undergoing the greatest change since the Peace of Westphalia signed in 1648 that ended the 30 Years’ War. The Treaty of Westphalia essentially created the concept of a “nation state” with sovereignty over its own territory and domestic affairs.

With the advent of the internet, we no longer need big and powerful nations. The USSR became the first goliath to collapse but I believe it was not the last. Instant communication means that governments can no longer control the narrative. When Assad’s Syrian government was accused of staging a chemical weapons attack on its own people, it took mere hours for that false flag operation to be exposed. When Israel mounts another massacre on the world’s biggest open-air prison in Gaza, the world takes notice and everyone can decide for themselves who the victims are and who is the aggressor.

The banking system is collapsing. I don’t mean to say it’s going to collapse, it’s collapsing as I write. Only few recognize it today but when the system grinds to a halt after the banks steal all the deposits of their customers, the world will get it. We may well have our first worldwide revolution as a result. We have already seen just how thrilled the populations were when the banks closed in Argentina, Greece, Italy and Spain. The popularity of Trump and Sanders is a monument to just how pissed Americans are at their government, with recent polls showing 81 per cent of those polled were unhappy with the Federal government. When the banks close, the 99 per cent are going to be some kind of pissed.

The United States began the process of living beyond its means by printing money after the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944. It sounded like a great idea to Europe as a way of funding their cradle-to-grave social programs. Now the world is awash in a sea of debt that can never be paid back.

All debts get settled. Either the borrower pays them or the lender pays them. The world had its last opportunity to settle the books in 2008 in the GFC, and failed. Now the debt level is so high it will take a great collapse to return to sanity.

The good news is that we have far more government than we can reasonably afford. All governments have been buying votes by making promises they could not possibly afford. It’s not an issue of taxes; no government could afford to tax their voters enough to pay for the promises they have made. We will have less government in the future simply because we can’t afford them; and, with any luck at all, fewer wars. The world has gone full cycle since the Peace of Westphalia.

Peace is never popular. No politicians ever won election on a plank of peace. It’s ingrained in humans to want wars for a variety of reasons. But we will have peace because we can no longer afford constant war.

The cost is too high.

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Bob Moriarty
President: 321gold
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