The Old Wars Were Less Costly

It seems to me it would be far easier, and much less killing, to just have a religious war. ISIS thinks it is having a holy war, but we Christians are no longer allowed to, thanks to secular bastards who insist we must kill people for other, less specific reasons, like degrading and/or destroying an entity that exists because we've spent several decades degrading and or destroying any sort of civilization in the Middle East.

Why did we even invade Libya anyway? Now ISIS is apparently occupying the space we are supposedly occupying. Are we sending them paychecks too?

It seems to me it would also be far easier, and much less killing, if we had a resource war- you know, if the war for oil meme was 100% totally true, and that there wasn't this other meme- war for war. We could be sucking oil out of the ground to sort of wholesale fund a giant economic boom in relative peace, but there's this damn war industry, apparently. Got to sell people more bombs, or something.

It also seems far easier and with much less killing, to have a sort of limited ethnic war. Arabs, Kurds, French people, Persians- once there's like this actual place recognized as France, then you can just sort of defend it against non-French, so the relative amount of killings go down because folks aren't using frenchness as an excuse to go running around the globe killing people.

But now we have the modern states, and the modern excuses for continually meddling, continually warring, and that universalist mentality of being able to prosecute anything anywhere. This causes more death, more war, and more angry people willing to fight the West. In fact, this behavior belies what made the West the West, since, for most of Europe's history it was actually a bunch of small realms, city-states, etc... where governance was largely decentralized and people could- even though it was often discouraged- walk out if their rulers were assholes.

So now, we aren't fighting for religion, nor are we fighting for resources, nor are we fighting for an ethnic homeland (nationalism). No, we are fighting for our leader's "right" to screw up the rest of the world just like they are doing here at home. Can a good government even exist out there, without the U.S. threatening it with either the military or bank laws?