Gentlemen! Gentlemen! To order!

War! War, gentlemen and gentlewomen, is a racket! Settle down now, gentlemen. We all know this to be the case. Though it is impolitic to speak it, we are all aware, we are all enlightened here, men and women of the modern age, and we know that war is a racket. Always has been, always will be. The latest entry in the long cannon of great works and scholarship on the subject is here in the Los Angeles Times:

Leopold cleared at least $1.1 billion in today's dollars during the 23 years he controlled Congo, and his businessmen friends made additional huge sums. Much of the money flowed into companies with special royal concession rights to exploit the rain forest. Final question, for extra credit: Do those companies remind you of anything? If you mentioned Halliburton or DynCorp, you're right again.

Order! I call for order! We must face it. We must face up to the truth inside of us. Even the Trojan War was more for gold than Helen. And so all the tragic and "glorious" little wars we fight are a racket, they line pockets and fill coffers greater in volume than even the sum of their wounds and barrels of spilled guts. Twas always so. I recommend we adjourn and consider the racket and What Is To Be Done. Suggested topic for working groups: can we truly be sustained by all the grain of Babylon? Does its measure weighed in the balance make our souls weighty enough to sustain? One doubts.