If it wasn't for veterans we would all be speaking Iraqi...

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/05/thomas-dilorenzo/celebrating-militaristic-fascism/

Thirty years later President James Polk “justified” an invasion of Mexico by claiming that the tiny Mexican army posed an “imminent” threat to Americans.   It was thus James Polk, not George W. Bush, who first used the excuse of “pre-emptive war” to invade and mass murder foreigners who had done no harm to Americans.  Polk’s war enabled the American state to acquire California and New Mexico at a cost of about 15,000 American lives and an estimated 25,000 Mexican casualties.


....The state orchestrates never-ending memorials to itself and its wars because war is the health of the state (and in almost all cases, the deadly enemy of freedom and prosperity).

During his only two years in the U.S. Congress Abraham Lincoln voiced opposition to the Mexican War, but on his inauguration day (March 4, 1861) he threatened “invasion” and “bloodshed” in any state that refused to pay the federal tariff tax, which had been more than doubled two days earlier.  He would not back down to South Carolina’s tariff nullifiers, as President Andrew Jackson had done three decades earlier.  He called his War for Tariff Collection a war “to save the union” and said repeatedly that that was the one and only reason why he launched an invasion of his own country in a war that led to the death of as many as 850,000 Americans according to the latest research.  Of course, Lincoln’s war literally destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replaced it with a Soviet-style compulsory union held together at gunpoint.  All other countries of the world, including all of the Northern states of the U.S., ended slavery peacefully.  Lincoln instead used the slaves as political pawns in a war that was about finally consolidating all political power in Washington, D.C., the pipe dream of the “nationalists” in American politics since the time of Hamilton, their Machiavellian inspiration.


...Rothbard was right: The only two just, defensive wars in American history were the American Revolution and the South’s side during the War to Prevent Southern Independence.