>> If the ruling class are
>> pacific, why do they exclude pacifists?
>
> I explicitly said that the ruling class isn't pacific. And you've yet
> to demonstrate why the examples I gave - e.g., City opposition to
> entry into WW I, New York capitalists' desire to appease the South in
> the 1850s, they mysterious lack of evidence of oil industry agitation
> for the invasion of Iraq - aren't problems to be explained.
==============================
I don't doubt your facts, and they do pose a challenge to the materialist
understanding of the purpose of wars, but I think they can still be
understood within that framework.
Were your examples above typically reservations expressed in private or open criticism of government preparations for war? In the case of Iraq, I think it's clear that the differences within the ruling class were openly and sharply expressed to an unprecedented degree, and not only from opposition Democrats, but more notably by Scowcroft and other veterans of the Republican establishment. Wall Street always climbs a wall of worry, including in the political arena, but this went beyond mere anxiety, and was solidly rooted in the experience of the failed land war in Vietnam.
Such airing of differences doesn't seem to be the norm, however, although one can almost always expect such differences to exist. I don't think the ruling class is ever monolithic one way or the other about its political options, including war, nor would we expect it to be. It is divided sectorally by interest and, ideologically, into a liberal and conservative wing - with the two sometimes overlapping.
I think Yoshie represents that part of the left which tends to blur these internal class differences more than we do, but maybe that's unfair. By all means, let's hear what she has to say further on this question.