The Culture Of Constant Conflict

The following graph from The New York Times illustrates how money is spent: it costs us almost as much to combat Osama Bin Laden and approximately 5 to 8,000 bearded mullahs as it did to stand up against the USSR, a real nation-state with an army, navy, missiles, etc. Who is kidding whom? (Just how many enemies do we have? Is the number infinite? Maybe. What this indicates is that in a war minded culture where every conflict is settled by violence, it will cost the same to fight against just a few thousand individuals as it does to wage war against a coalition of countries allied against us!)