War is a Racket

The author of the book 'War is a Racket' is General Smedley D. Butler, America's most highly decorated General, and subsequent to that career, war's most vocal critic. 

During his military service in the first couple decades of last century, he quickly became aware that war is never the claimed nobel act of freeing or protecting people from a military aggressor. Rather war is a racket, a scam, organised by the rich and powerful which is designed specifically to better their own financial interests. 
Below is a great quote from 'War is a Racket' where Butler puts it quite plainly that the various wars and invasions that he was involved in were merely for the benefit of big business:

     "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went it's way unmolested." 

     "War is a racket. It has always been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
     A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted fot the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
     In the World War [WWI] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War."

Whatever the motivations for war may be, we must never forget the costs.