Melania Romavov Posted this.. get Dong

The Vietnam and Iraq wars, examined through the lens of the fiscal alchemy of war, reveal an insidious transformation in the architecture of modern conflict. No longer merely geopolitical contests, these wars exemplify how state violence is engineered as a repeatable economic activation mechanism. The income tax, codified in 1913, and the simultaneous creation of the Federal Reserve transformed war from a national liability into a profit cycle, underwritten by the labor of the citizenry and monetized through sovereign debt. In Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin incident served as a manufactured catalyst, launching a prolonged war whose costs were invisibly extracted from the populace, not only in dollars but in blood, generational trauma, and social upheaval.

The Vietnam War became a template for sustained fiscal-military engagement. The state’s ability to issue bonds backed by future income tax revenue meant the war machine no longer needed gold reserves or popular consent—it required only narrative justification. Televised propaganda, economic conscription of marginalized youth, and the demonization of communism formed the scaffolding of public compliance. But behind the veil, the real beneficiaries were banks, weapons manufacturers, and political intermediaries. War was no longer a national emergency—it was a business model, tightly integrated into GDP and justified through institutionalized opacity.

Fast-forward to Iraq (2003–2011), and the formula repeats with upgraded precision. The false pretense of weapons of mass destruction echoes Vietnam’s trigger narrative. Income tax–backed bonds fueled a 4.7% GDP defense peak, enriching private contractors like Halliburton, while the Federal Reserve maintained artificially low interest rates that fed a parallel housing bubble. The war provided economic acceleration during a fragile moment in U.S. history, only to culminate in systemic collapse and widespread austerity. This “dual harvest” mechanism—stimulus through war, followed by deflationary tightening—taxed not just wealth but human vitality and public trust.

Both wars reflect the broader metaphysical inversion at play: taxation, once a tool for protection and collective good, now serves to fund imperial violence and elite profit. These conflicts are not failures of diplomacy, but fiscal rites—engineered crises that perpetuate control through debt, trauma, and complexity. The real war is not fought abroad but within the very architecture of economic policy, where biopolitical tools like income tax and centralized banking quietly harvest the potential of generations under the guise of national interest.

As Vietnam repositions itself as a rising economic force and Iraq pushes toward currency reinstatement, the legacy of fiscal exploitation looms. Their path forward will hinge on breaking the cycle of foreign-debt entrapment and reclaiming monetary sovereignty. For Iraq, a revalued dinar tied to natural resource wealth and regional trade could sever dependency on the war-born dollar regime. Vietnam, with its manufacturing strength and digital economy, could anchor a gold-backed or asset-pegged currency model within the BRICS+ framework. But for either to succeed, they must escape the fiscal-military complex that once fed off their blood and future. Reinstatement is not just economic policy—it is liberation.

Melaniastasia Romanov

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